LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 12 : 5 May 2012
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         S. M. Ravichandran, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

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Some Problems in Computer Aided Translation and the Need for Tools – Manipuri and Tamil Case Study

Soibam Rebika Devi, M.Sc. (Biology), M.A. (Linguistics), M.A. (Translation)

1. Introduction

In this era of information technology explosion, translation is inevitable and has a major role to play in the development of languages and knowledge. The use of modern technology in Computer Aided Translation can help us translate quickly. A question arises as to whether a computer can fruitfully be utilized for translation. In this paper, an attempt is made to look into how far a computer can be used for translation. It seems, so far, no fruitful machine translation is done among Indian languages.

The number of structures in any language is finite to a greater extent. It is estimated that there may be around 40 structures and hence, they are very much rule based, and language-specific features may, sometimes, add a few to it. Similarities and differences between languages can be studied by Contrastive Analysis and it may help to evaluate the potentiality of computer in translation. This study brings out cross-linguistic similarities as well as differences between Manipuri and Tamil and tries to elicit the tools necessary for the translation. Further, a model of computer aided translation is also proposed. This will help us in producing translation tools as well for translation.

Scholars in the field of translation suggest a corpus-based translation to make the translation more successful and foolproof. This needs enormous size of corpus to make a successful translation; such an attempt is being made for corpus by LDC-IL, CIIL, Mysore. Furthermore, they try to make an automated POS tagging also, which will definitely help in machine translation.

This study stands on the view that computer can be used as an aid for very quick translation to support a human translator. In other words, the computer may translate quickly an enormous amount of texts with its limitations, such as giving equivalences, etc. for which a bilingual dictionary (tool 1) is necessary. Many of the decisions are to be taken by the human being involved in this kind of translation. Many of the structural-grammatical features are to be learned by practice only, for example, the PNG markers in Tamil. Computer may do the same after a long time practice. Only when these features are tagged to the words, a computer can translate them; otherwise only nonsensical translation would result in.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Soibam Rebika Devi, M.Sc. (Biology), M.A. (Linguistics), M.A. (Translation)
Resource Person
National Translation Mission
Central Institute of Indian languages
Mysore 570 006
Karnataka
India
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