machine translation
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GC: n

CT: Theoretically more interesting, though much more difficult, is the automatic grammatical analysis of texts by computer. Considerable progress was made in this area by research groups working on machine translation and information retrieval in the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, France and a few other countries in the decade between the mid-1950s and the mid-1960s.

S: EncBrit – http://global.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/354675/machine-translation (last access: 13 July 2014)

N: 1. Machine translation (MT) 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 Spanish).
2. To process any translation, human or automated, the meaning of a text in the original (source) language must be fully restored in the target language, i.e. the translation. While on the surface this seems straightforward, it is far more complex. Translation is not a mere word-for-word substitution. A translator must interpret and analyze all of the elements in the text and know how each word may influence another. This requires extensive expertise in grammar, syntax (sentence structure), semantics (meanings), etc., in the source and target languages, as well as familiarity with each local region.
3. Human and machine translation each have their share of challenges. For example, no two individual translators can produce identical translations of the same text in the same language pair, and it may take several rounds of revisions to meet customer satisfaction. But the greater challenge lies in how machine translation can produce publishable quality translations.

S: http://www.systransoft.com/systran/corporate-profile/translation-technology/what-is-machine-translation/ (last access: 13th July 2014)

SYN: 1. MT, automated translation, automatic translation. 2. fully automatic machine translation.

S: 1. GDT. 2. http://www.fti.uab.cat/tradumatica/revista/num4/articles/06/06.pdf (last access: 27 December 2014).

CR: computer science, language engineering, [machine-aided human translation], machine translation (2), translation.