Martin Kay

Martin Kay's Translation is concerned with the fundamental underpinnings of the titular subject. Kay argues that the primary responsibility of the translator is to the referents of words themselves. He shows how a pair of sentences that might have widely different meanings in isolation could have similar meanings in some contexts. Exploring such key subjects as how to recognize when a pair of texts might be translations of each other, Kay attempts to answer the essential question: What is translation anyway?

Since the dawn of the age of computers, researchers have been pushing the limits of available processing power to tackle the formidable challenge of developing software that can understand ordinary human language. At the forefront of this quest for the past fifty years, Martin Kay has been a constant source of new algorithms that have proven fundamental to progress in computational linguistics. "Collected Papers of Martin Kay", the first comprehensive collection of his works to date, opens a window into the growth of an increasingly important field of scientific research and development.

The Verbmobil System currently under development in Germany would input speech in a source language dialogue, translate it, and output synthesized speech in a target language, all in real time under the conditions of face-to-face dialogue. This preliminary study is an assessment of the state of the art of the speech recognition and machine translation fields, and a frank discussion of the challenges the developers of such a system face. A speech-based machine translation system in effect combines all the technical problems of understanding and generation systems and adds the very special difficulties of translation. The difficulties of translation are illustrated with a variety of examples culled from a number of languages. A general architecture called translation-by-negotiation is proposed. This book is of value not only to students of speech recognition and machine translation, but to anyone interested in natural language processing in general, since computational problems and linguistic approaches at various levels of linguistics and analysis are discussed.

The Verbmobil System currently under development in Germany would input speech in a source language dialogue, translate it, and output synthesized speech in a target language, all in real time under the conditions of face-to-face dialogue. This preliminary study is an assessment of the state of the art of the speech recognition and machine translation fields, and a frank discussion of the challenges the developers of such a system face. A speech-based machine translation system in effect combines all the technical problems of understanding and generation systems and adds the very special difficulties of translation. The difficulties of translation are illustrated with a variety of examples culled from a number of languages. A general architecture called translation-by-negotiation is proposed. This book is of value not only to students of speech recognition and machine translation, but to anyone interested in natural language processing in general, since computational problems and linguistic approaches at various levels of linguistics and analysis are discussed.