On this page are pointers to a range of machine translation programs that are available on the Web. With these programs you can translate between a wide varieties: quality, however, as you will see varies greatly!
The idea of this page is to give some examples where you can get bits of text translated simply and quickly. You should use these examples to work out what kind of knowlege the MT system is using to do its translation. You should think of short bits of text, just one or two sentences, that need some particular kind of knowledge to translate. Submit these to the MT systems and see what they do with them. This should give you hints as to what kind of information the MT system has inside it.
This diagram that we saw in class and which you have as a hand-out summarized the kinds of knowledge that are typically employed by human translators and by machine: can you see which of these kinds of information are available in the MT systems listed below?
What kind of syntactic knowledge do they have? What kind of semantic? What kind of contextual? etc. etc.
Here are some sentences to have translated to begin with:
- He went to the ball.
- He kicked the ball.
- He stabbed John.
- He likes Mary.
- I like to eat.
- John entered the house.
- I think the baby just fell.
- I think the baby has just fallen over.
- I think the dog only tripped.
- John hit the dog with a stick.
- The computer outputs the data; it is fast.
- The computer writes a file; it is in ascii.
- John is hungry.
- The girl ran down the stairs; she had lost a shoe.
With these sentences, think about what the MT program is doing right and what it is doing wrong. Make up some further sentences to test whether it has the knowledge that you think it has or not. Compile a list of its mistakes and try to classify this list into types of mistakes. Bring this list of problems to class next time and we will discuss them.
Sometimes the MT systems offer other 'tools' to help the translation: what are these and do they make up for bad quality?!
Feel free to try out other languages in order to get a better view of the systems capabilities!! Try other types of 'phenomena' -- what can these MT systems not translate?!
The altavista translation service enables you to translate and web pages or bits of text that you type in. The translation service can be reached directly from here. You can also go to the Alta Vista search engine, retreive something, and click on translate.
Saillabs Langenscheidts Translation
LanguageWare.net : N.B. for this one you need to provide a registration number, otherwise it won't translate for you. The following is a temporary number that you can use: 4606700041920980 -- Remember you can cut and paste this number from the Edit option in the Web browser menu bar!
And one strictly for at home:
Babylon Translator (freeware) this is a program that gives you word-for-word translations whenever you point your mouse at some word in a word processing program such as Word. Only for use at home....
