An Introduction to Machine Translation

by W. John Hutchins

The translation of foreign language texts by computers was one of the first tasks that the pioneers of computing and artificial intelligence set themselves. Machine translation is again becoming an important field of research and development as the need for translations of technical and commercial documentation is growing beyond the capacity of the translation profession.

Hardcover

First published April 16, 1992

Reviews

[Yuxiang Wei · Rating 4 out of 5]

I came across this book in my university's library when preparing for my application for a research degree. It served for me as a helpful priliminary description of the entire enterprise of automatic translation, me being quite an amature in the areas of both linguistics and computer science. The content of this book is relatively comprehensive, covering a range of issues from machine translation development to its practical applications and evaluation methods, from relavant linguistic theories to the basic computational means of analyzing and transferring language structures. It addresses key problems for machine translation systems as well. Not bad, I would say, if you want to know a little bit about what is going in the "black box" of, say, google translate. But the problem is that it seems too out of date to really help people understand what we are using today. Really, the electronics world is developing and updating so fast nowadays that I don't see much possibility, in this book, of inspiring people for achieving much either in the academia or in the technical practices. Nevertheless Hutchins' efforts of organizing the issues in two subject areas that used to be far distant and separate is just amazing. The way he illustrates and explains theories is also good enough for an outsider to get a glimpse of the field. It's worthy of recommending, to some extent.