OBSTACLES BEHIND COMPUTER TRANSLATIONS
The system of communication we call language is very complex and very arbitrary. Efforts to tame it, to break it in, are doomed to failure because language is a community effort, and every speaker, and writer, uses it according to personal, cultural, educational and stylistic idiosyncrasies. Dean Alford, The Queen’s English , put it like this: “Neither grammar nor rule governs the idiom of a people.” Several obstacles hinder translation software from being acceptable: Polysemy –multiple meanings of a word- is not yet understood by computer software. The ambiguities of meaning are still beyond any software in the market. “Vela” can both be a “candle” or a “sail”. “Quemaron las velas”, they burned the sails is translated as “candles burned.” Punctuation : This very important part of the written language presents almost an insurmountable obstacle for the machine translator: “Y gritando que no la mató, se fue” is nonsensically translated as: “And screaming that he killed he...