Maschinelle Übersetzung – Gegenwart und Perspektiven

Communication across all language barriers has long been a goal of humankind. In recent years, new technologies have enabled this at least partially. New approaches and different methods in the field of Machine Translation (MT) are continuously being improved, modified, and combined, as well. Significant progress has already been achieved in this area; many automatic translation tools, such as Google Translate and Babelfish, can translate not only short texts, but also complete web pages in real time. In recent years, new advances are being made in the mobile area; Googles Translate app for Android and iOS, for example, can recognize and translate words within photographs taken by the mobile device (to translate a restaurant menu, for instance). Despite this progress, a “perfect” machine translation system seems to be an impossibility because a machine translation system, however advanced, will always have some limitations. Human languages contain many irregularities and exceptions, and consequently go through a constant process of change, which is difficult to measure or to be processed automatically. This paper gives a short introduction of the state of the art of MT. It examines the following aspects: types of MT, the most conventional and widely developed approaches, and also the advantages and disadvantages of these different paradigms