Machine Translation

6

Example-Based Machine Translation

In his seminal paper introducing example-based machine translation, Makoto Nagao (1984) wrote:

Our fundamental ideas about translation are:

1. Man does not translate a simple sentence by doing deep linguistic analysis, rather,

2. Man does the translation, first, by properly decomposing an input sentence into certain fragmental phrases (very often, into case frame units), then, by translating these fragmental phrases into other language phrases, and finally by properly composing these fragmental translations into one long sentence. The translation of each fragmental phrase will be done by the analogy translation principle with proper examples as its reference, which is illustrated above. (emphasis added)