Envisioning Machine Translation in the Information Future

Abstract

Although undeniably useful for the translation of certain types of repetitive document, current translation memory technology is limited by the rudimentary techniques employed for approximate matching. Such systems, moreover, incorporate no real notion of a document, since the databases that underlie them are essentially composed of isolated sentence strings. As a result, current TM products can only exploit a small portion of the knowledge residing in translators’ past production. This paper examines some of the changes that will have to be implemented if the technology is to be made more widely applicable.