Can Machines Be Scientific Translators?

Within the last few years portable “electronic dictionaries” have been introduced. I These gadgets were originally intended to help foreign travelers communicate with the natives. The devices, which cost from $2W-$300, are initially a lot of fun. But often they prove to be less useful than a good bilingual dictionary or phrasebook because they are so limited in vocabulary. The models I tested] are limited to about 2,000 words and phrases. Texas Instruments and Sharp Electronics have each unveiled speaking translators. z But before such machines can compete successf ttlly with printed dictionaries, they’ll have to include from 5,000 to f0,000 items. Still, about 200,000 nonspeaking electronic dictionaries were sold last year in the US, and 200,000 more worldwide. 3 These machines work on a word-toword basis. However, scientists have been working on a more sophisticated means of machine translation (MT) for about 30 years. When MT began, researchers hoped that machines could be made to translate with little or no human editing. So far this hasn’t been accomplished. But many MT researchers believe that human editing of machine output is a viable approach to MT. Thk process is called machineaided translation (MAT). The idea behind MAT is that machines can free human translators from the repetitious parts of the translation task. Critics of MT and MAT believe that terminology August 18, 1980