On Tue, Jul 31, 2001 at 09:40:27AM -0700, Soo In wrote:
> Have a faith in technology and give it another 5
> years.  I am amazed how accurate those translation
> programs progressed last couple of years.  

Well, as far as I can tell, machine translation hasn't really progressed
that much for years now.  Machines get faster, but isn't really a brute
force problem at this point.

> Does anybody know what the main algorithm used for
> translation program?  Does it look up each word,
> phrases or whole sentences?

For a really neat discussion on it I would suggest Hofstadter's "Le Ton Beau
De Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language".  It's one of my favorite
books.

Like much of Hofstadter's written works, it wanders into many different
topics, but its primary theme is translation.  He's an AI professor, so even
though much of the focus is on the philosophy and art of translation, he
does talk about where machine translation was at and where he expected it to
go.  (It was published in '98, so it's relatively recent.)

-- 
Andy <turner@mikomi.org> - http://anime.mikomi.org/ - Community Anime Reviews
Mr. Teapot says...
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