ACL4 Machine Translation Exam 1999

Andy Way and Lynne Bowker
Dublin City University

• MT is a waste of time because you will never make a machine that can translate Shakespeare.
• There was/is an MT system which translated The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak into the Russian equivalent of The vodka is good, but the steak is lousy, and hydraulic ram into the French equivalent of water goat. MT is useless.
• Generally, the quality of translation you can get from an MT system is very low. This makes them useless in practice.
• MT threatens the jobs of translators.
• The Japanese have developed a system that you can talk to on the phone. It translates what you say into Japanese, and translates the other speaker's replies into English.
• There is an amazing South American Indian language with a structure of such logical perfection that it solves the problem of designing MT systems.
• MT systems are machines, and buying an MT system should be very much like buying a car.

Q 2.
Assuming a translation bureau has integrated MT into its translation process, one might isolate the following subtasks as being integral components of this process:

• Document preparation
• Translation
• Document revision

Q 3.
Outline some of the issues involved in the processes of Analysis and Generation? How do their demands differ?

Q 4.
Empirical methods have recently made a comeback in many areas of NLP, including MT. Describe the processes involved in statistical approaches to MT, and outline some of the advantages of this method over more traditional rule-based methods. What, if any, are the limitations of such an approach?

Q 5.
How attainable do you consider a fully language-neutral interlingua to be? Substantiate your opinions with insights from translational ambiguities.

Q6.
There are three main types of lexical ambiguity which pose problems for MT systems: polysemy, homography and homonymy.
a) Explain the differences between these three, supporting your explanations with examples.
b) While it is important to resolve all three types of lexical ambiguity in MT, some errors are more serious than others. Rate these three types of lexical ambiguity in order of importance in which they should be resolved, and justify your ranking order.

Q7.
What do you understand by the following terms? Give examples where appropriate.

• leveraging
• active terminology recognition
• alignment
• localization
• rendering
• fuzzy matching
• translation memory
• S-unit

Q8.
a) Explain what is meant by the term “controlled language”.

 b) What are the advantages of using a controlled language in the context of machine translation?

 c) Consider the English source text below and its translation into either French or German. What modifications would you make to the source text in order to try to improve the quality of the target text?
 
 

Original English text Planning a dream vacation can be fun but tiring because one has to consider all sorts of things like what clothes you should bring (without bringing the lot), for instance, think about whether they will do in warm and cool weather and if your outfits are versatile enough for a spot of casual sightseeing and dancing the night away too.

French translation (as produced by Alta Vista’s web translation service) La planification des vacances rêveuses peut être amusement mais fatiguer parce qu'on doit considérer tous les tris des choses comme quels vêtements vous devriez apporter (sans apporter le sort), par exemple, pensez environ s' ils suffiront par temps chaud et frais et si vos équipements sont assez souples pour une tache de la visite touristique occasionnelle et de danser la nuit loin aussi.

German translation (as produced by Alta Vista’s web translation service) Traumferien zu planen kann Spaß aber Ermüden sein, weil man alle Sortierungen von Sachen betrachten muß wie, was Kleidung Sie holen sollten (ohne das Lot zu holen), zum Beispiel denken Sie ungefähr, ob sie im warmen und kühlen Wetter tun und wenn Ihre Ausstattungen genug für einen Punkt beiläufigem von sightseeing und die Nacht von tanzen weg auch vielseitig begabt sind.