On the Concept of Translation Unit in a Machine Translation Framework

Abstract

The article looks at the question whether the concept of translation unit might apply to the sphere of machine translation and whether the size of the unit influences the quality of translation. While modern machine translation systems offer an acceptable level of quality, a number of problems mainly related to the structural organization of the text remain unresolved, hence the question posed in the paper. The article offers a review of modern readings of the concept and pays special attention to the question whether the scope of the term changes depending on whether the object of research is the target text or the translation process. The paper also provides a quick look on the research methods for both text-oriented and process-oriented approaches, such as comparative analysis of language pairs and Think Aloud Protocol. Based on a review of existing machine translation models, each of them is analyzed to answer the question whether a unit of translation can be defined for a given system and what its size is. It is concluded that a unit of translation can be viewed as either a unit of analysis or a unit of processing with respect to text-oriented and process-oriented perspectives on to the study of translation. The unit of translation has a dynamic character and influences the quality of the target text. In machine translation, the unit of translation as a unit of analysis is not applicable for systems based on probabilistic non-linguistic methods. For rule-based machine translation systems, both readings of the unit of translation concept are applicable, but hardly go beyond a single sentence. Accordingly, at least one type of translation problem – intra-textual relations resolutions – remains largely unaddressed in the present state of affairs in machine translation.