constructing pathways to translation - Higher Education Commission

quantifiable textual and extra- textual regularities, but quantification can never be an end
in itself. Regularities have to be interpreted, but their interpretation is by no means
straightforward. What has to be realized in the first place is that, computer aided analysis
of corpora is highly dependent on the software in use. Researchers should know when to
use what tool, and when the tools, themselves become the limiting factor. They need to
approach corpora with realistic goals, and it is the challenge for contemporary scholars to
work out how this potential can best be realized (Kenny, 2001).
1.5.3 Machine Translation And Machine – Aided Translation:
The idea of mechanized translation as an intermediate universal language has been round
since 17 th century. The first concrete proposal for a ‘ translation machine’ can be dated
by the issue of the patents in 1933, to the Russian Peter Smirnov- Troyanskii and to the
American Frenchman, Georges Astrouni. But Warner Weaver is credited as the founding
father of Machine Translation (MT) research.
Most recent approaches to defining different types of computerized translation take as
their principal criterion the degree of automation that is ‘the relative contribution of the
machine and the human translator to the translation process’, resulting in a classification
which distinguishes among machine-aided human translation(MAHT), human aided
machine translation(HAMT), and Fully Automatic Machine Translation(FAMT)
(Baker,1998 ).
Problems and the Future of (MT)
The present activities in machine aided translation need to be seen in the wider context of
research on the automation of linguistic processes, and in the context of activities in
documentation and information science. Problems are often common to many different
processes involving language and translation, and methods developed in one area may
well be applicable in others.
The quality of the translations of existing operational MT systems is not good enough on
the whole. Technology data banks are undoubtedly beneficial for large translation
services at the present time: quality is maintained, efficiency of translators may be
improved, and translators are not relegated to the exercise of revising MT output. In
general the future of MT is not without promise. There are now broad areas of agreement
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