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Abstract
In the modern world, there is an increased need for language translations owing to the fact that language is an effective medium of communication. The demand for translation has become more in recent years due to increase in the exchange of information between various regions using different regional languages. Accessibility to web document in other languages, for instance, has been a concern for information Professionals. Machine translation (MT), a subfield under Artificial Intelligence, is the application of computers to the task of translating texts from one natural (human) language to another. Many approaches have been used in the recent times to develop an MT system. Each of these approaches has its own advantages and challenges. This paper takes a look at these approaches with the few of identifying their individual features, challenges and the best domain they are best suited to.
Keywords: Machine Translation, Rule-based Approach, Corpus-based Approach, Statistical Approach, Transfer-Based Approach
1. Introduction
Machine translation sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT (not to be confused with computer-aided translation, machine-aided human translation (MAHT) or interactive translation) is automated translation. It is the process by which computer software is used to translate a text from one natural language (such as English) to another (such as Ibo).
The idea of machine translation may be traced back to the 17th century. In 1629, René Descartes proposed a universal language, with equivalent ideas in different tongues sharing one symbol. The field of -machine translation" appeared in Warren Weaver's Memorandum on Translation (1949). The first researcher in the field, Yehosha Bar-Hillel, began his research at MIT (1951). A Georgetown MT research team followed (1951) with a public demonstration of its system in 1954. MT research programmes popped up in Japan and Russia (1955), and the first MT conference was held in London (1956). Researchers continued to join the field as the Association for Machine Translation and Computational Linguistics was formed in the U.S. (1962) and the National Academy of Sciences formed the Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee (ALPAC) to study MT (1964). Real progress was much slower, however, and after the ALPAC report (1966), which found that the ten-year-long research had failed to fulfill expectations, funding was greatly reduced. The idea of using digital computers for translation...