Problems of machine translation of business texts from Russian into English

Abstract

This article draws on the example of business texts to consider practical aspects of the distortion of meaning in translation from one language to another in the available machine translation (MT) systems and their underlying approach based on word-by-word translation. An integrated functional approach to translating business texts is suggested on the basis of analyzing semantic and morphological features of actual text content and also on axiological and epistemic semantic features that bring to light subjective modality. The suggested technique is used to develop an algorithm of business text MT that makes it possible to resolve the word-by-word translation issue and conveys the meanings of short texts. Cases of testing the suggested technique and the derived algorithm are considered for the Russian–English language pair.