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<Paper uid="J85-1001">
  <Title>A SURVEY OF MACHINE TRANSLATION: ITS HISTORY, CURRENT STATUS, AND FUTURE PROSPECTS</Title>
  <Section position="31" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
CONCLUSIONS
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The translation problem will not go away, and human solutions (short of full automation) do not now, and never will, suffice. MT systems have already scored successes among the user community, and the trend can hardly fail to continue as users demand further improvements and greater speed, and MT system vendors respond. The half-million pages of text translated by machine in 1984 is but a drop in the bucket of translation demand. Of course, the need for research is great, but some current and future applications will continue to succeed on economic grounds alone - and to the user community, this is virtually the only measure of success or failure.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> It is important to note that translation systems are not going to &amp;quot;fall out&amp;quot; of AI efforts not seriously contending with multiple languages from the start. There are two reasons for this. First, English is not a representative language. Relatively speaking, it is not even a very hard language from the standpoint of Computational Linguistics: Japanese, Chinese, Russian, and even German, for example, seem more difficult to deal with using existing CL techniques - surely in part due to the nearly total concentration of CL workers on English, and their consequent development of tools specifically for English (and, accidentally, for English-like languages). Developing translation ability will require similar concentration by CL workers on other languages; nothing less will suffice.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Second, it would seem that translation is not by any means a simple matter of understanding the source text, then reproducing it in the target language - even though many translators (and virtually every layman) will say this is so. On the one hand, there is the serious question of whether, in for example the case of an article on frontline research in semiconductor switching theory, or particle physics, a translator really does &amp;quot;fully comprehend&amp;quot; the content of the article he is translating. One would suspect not. (Johnson (1983) makes a point of claiming that he has produced translations, judged good by informed peers, in technical areas where his expertise is deficient, and his understanding, incomplete.) On the other hand, it is also true that translation schools expend considerable effort teaching techniques for low-level lexical and syntactic manipulation - a curious fact to contrast with the usual &amp;quot;full comprehension&amp;quot; claim. In any event, every qualified translator will agree that there is much more to translation than simple analysis/synthesis (an almost prime facie proof of the necessity for Transfer).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> What this means is that the development of translation as an application of Computational Linguistics will require substantial research in its own right in addition to the work necessary in order to provide the basic multilingual analysis and synthesis tools. Translators must be consulted, for they are the experts in translation. None of this will happen by accident; it must result from design.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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