Machine Translation: Theory, Applications, and Evaluation. An Assessment of the State-of-the-art (Buchvorstellung)

Machine Translation (MT) has made a comeback during the 1990s. Though systems, as to their Iinguistic performance, are much what they were 10 years earlier, there have been significant changes on the technical level. Systems that were once costly and running on mainframes and expensive workstations only are now licensed for rather modest sums to run on personal computers. The comeback of MT has been furthered by substantial progress in the development of auxiliary linguistic tools for text authoring and editing, as well as for translation (machine-aided translation, MAT). In order to achieve similar progress in MT we have to gain more knowledge and a better understanding of how (human and machine) translation works. We may learn something about this from cognitive science and translation theory. A theory of MT is only just developing. Another primary information source is system evaluation and translation quality assessment. MT output quality greatly varies with different formal and content types of input. The state-of-the-art in the domains mentioned is documented in this volume by individual contributions about (machine) translation research, system development and application, performance evaluation, and translation quality assessment. All papers are in English with significant summaries in German. The authors are confirmed experts in the domain, with individual accents on research and development, teaching and training, industrial and business applications, or evaluation and consulting.