In Defense of Rationalist Approaches to Mt Research

This paper presents a weak defense of rationalist approaches to Machine Translation (MT) based on the following line of reasoning. There is, independent of non-linguistic context, a one to many relationship between a source language text and the possible high quality target language translations of the text. This is due to the fact that there is a one to many relationship between a source language text and its possible interpretations against different non-linguistic context and between an interpretation and the possible target language forms that can be used to express that interpretation which vary according to non-linguistic context. To model such relationships requires the investigation of a source language text along side of a range of possible high quality translations of that text Machine translation systems can be (weak), if not must be (strong), developed on the basis of such models.