Problems of machine translation systems: Effect of cultural differences on sentence structure

Abstract

The potential and the limitation of current machine translation is discussed by comparing the output of human translation and that of virtual machine translation. Here, “virtual machine translation” means a kind of syntax-oriented literal translation which may be regarded as an idealized competence of today's practical machine translation. The above comparison shows that the main reason for the limitation or the incompleteness of current practical machine translation systems is the insufficient ability to treat “structural idiosyncrasies” of sentences. Also, some translation examples tell us that, without “understanding” the total meaning of the source sentence, it is quite difficult to manipulate the idiosyncrasies in sentence structure. Idiosyncratic gaps between source and target sentence structure usually originate in cultural differences, so that the computational treatment of these gaps is a very difficult problem. But the translation examples also give us some encouraging evidence that the principal technologies of today's not-yet-completed machine translation have sufficient potential for producing barely acceptable translation. The current practical efforts to treat such structural idiosyncrasies are also mentioned together with some long-range, basic-research type of approaches.