By: Allison Dorothy Posted on

Machine translation has recently become an integral part of our lives. Its development at the beginning of the 21st century was very rapid. In a relatively short period of time, in 15-20 years, it has become widespread everywhere: among professional translators, in various corporations and companies, which began to actively use machine translation systems for the operative solution of current tasks, among ordinary computer and smartphone users all over the world.

Its active dissemination is due to the high rate of social development. Globalization, urbanization, informatization and the dynamism of the modern world dictate a high demand for translation, which must be accurate and fast. Demand always creates supply. And this proposal was the introduction of machine translation, which is now very much in demand. It is designed to make human life easier and to solve the problems that inevitably arise in communication between people who do not speak foreign languages.

This raises a big scientific problem: how good is machine translation and is it able to completely eliminate human involvement in translation activities.

Machine translation is an amazing synthesis of linguistics and cybernetics. Its emergence was due to the presence of two important factors – social order and the development of technology.

Since ancient times the mankind wanted to overcome the language barriers. And it was dreamed that this would be done in the easiest way, which would provide the absence of a long study of languages and the existence of a special transformer of human speech or text. Attempts were even made to invent a universal language that would solve the problem of language barriers, such as the creation in 1887. Lazar Markovich Zamenhof’s Esperanto language. However, the idea did not become widespread in the end. The factor of technological development, i.e. Internet and computers became a decisive factor in the emergence of machine translation.

Let us highlight the characteristics and features of machine translation:

  1. machine translation is a peculiar kind of transformation of one language into another;
  2. when using machine translation, we can speak about multistage system of information decoding, when there is not only translation from one language to another, but also translation from computer language to human language;
  3. it is possible if there is an appropriate intermediary, which in this case is a computer, a special computer program, machine translation system. Therefore, the development of machine translation is entirely dependent on the development of informatics, cybernetics and technology;
  4. Quality of machine translation depends directly on algorithm of electronic translator, that is, on program quality. Accordingly, the better the quality of the program, the more perfect it is, the higher quality of translation can be received as a result;
  5. machine translation is focused primarily on the translation of texts, although active research is underway in relation to the translation of the speech stream;
  6. machine translation is characterized by high speed of information processing, but sometimes it happens to the detriment of quality;
  7. the use of machine translation implies a complete or partial absence of the translator – a person, thereby the human factor is reduced to almost zero, which often plays an important role in the translation of confidential information.

In modern linguistics, as well as directly in translation studies, there are two diametrically opposed views on the possibilities of machine translation. According to the first approach, such factors as the speed of machine translation, as well as a gradual improvement in its quality over time, make it possible to assume that in the future, electronic (machine) translation systems can fully replace the human translator in the process of cross-cultural interaction of specialists in the information field of scientific and technical orientation.

The opposing point of view argues that machine translation will never approach the level of human translation, so we should not pay special attention to this problem. Neither of these points of view reflects the real situation, but what is important is that electronic translation systems can really help translation work.

The advantages of machine translation include high speed, low cost, accessibility, versatility, ability to translate online, and confidentiality. In favor of machine translation is the fact that he is able to work with texts of a certain subject matter and translate them quite well. Professional machine translation systems, which are purchased and used by companies, are set up for a specific type of translation. They are loaded with terms on a given subject, they can operate with the conceptual apparatus not worse than a human translator.

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