A translation example by MT systems

         

        I´m going to use an MT system which is called Translendium to make a translation example from spanish into english, I mean, into a less related language and then I’m going to explain the gramatic errors and other errors that the tranlation programmes make. 

 

        As we can see,the first two lines of the spanish version are different in the english version, the programme hasn´t understand very well the spanish version so that the order of the words in the english has been change incorrectly, that´s why it is incorrect and it has no sense.

 

         Apart from that, some words in spanish have more than one meaning in english so in the tranlation appear all of the words, in this case the both words “step/crossing”.

 

       The same happens with the subjects; in spanish sometimes there aren’t subjects so in the translation appear different subjects “its/ his/her/ their…”, maybe because, in spanish, the subject isn’t very clear.

 

Finally, I have to mention other error that appear in the last paragraph, in the spanish version appear “… por una serie de murallas construidas y …” but in the english one the word “…una serie…” is translated into “series” and that is incorrect, because it is not the same thing.

 

RESOURCES:

 

• Translendium programme. http://www.translendium.net:8080/home/index.jsp?locale=es, fecha de la consulta el 11 de mayo del 2008, hora de la consulta las 18:00.

 

• http://littera.deusto.es/enwiki/index.php/User:ZiortzaVivanco/hlt0708/eg1esen, fecha de la consulta el 11 de mayo del 2008, hora de la consulta las 17:30.

 

• http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gran_Muralla_China, fecha de la consulta el 11 de mayo del 2008, hora de la consulta las 17:45.

Characteristics of a translation task according to the FEMTI report

           According to the FEMTI report, characteristics of a translationtask refers to the information flow intended for the output, from the point of view of the human or other thing who receives the translation.

           As the FEMTI report says, there are three characteristics of a translation task; assimilation, dissemination and communication. I´m going to explain a bit all of them:

 

• Assimilation: The ultimate purpose of the assimilation task is to monitor a large volume of texts produced by people outside the organization, in several laguages.

 

• Dissemination: The ultimate purpose of the dissemination task is to deliver to others a translation of documents produced inside the organization.The translation quality required is generally high, but translation speed is usually not a factor.

 

• Communication: The ultimate purpose of the communication task is to support multi-turn dialogues between people who speak different languages. The translation quality must be high enough for painless conversation, despite possible syntactically ill-formed input and idiosyncratic word and format usage.

 

           RESOURCES:

• FEMTI, a Framework for Machine Translation Evaluation in Isle, http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/mteval/, fecha de la consulta el 8 de mayo del 2008, hora de la consulta las 18:00.