The field of machine translation (MT) - the automation of translation between human languages - has existed for more than 50 years. MT helped to usher in the field of computational linguistics and has influenced methods and applications in knowledge representation, information theory, and mathematical statistics.

This book describes a novel, cross-linguistic approach to machine translation that solves certain classes of syntactic and lexical divergences by means of a lexical conceptual structure that can be composed and decomposed in language-specific ways. This approach allows the translator to operate uniformly across many languages, while still accounting for knowledge that is specific to each language.

Machine Translation and Transliteration involving Related, Low-resource Languages discusses an important aspect of natural language processing that has received lesser attention: translation and transliteration involving related languages in a low-resource setting. This is a very relevant real-world scenario for people living in neighbouring states/provinces/countries who speak similar languages and need to communicate with each other, but training data to build supporting MT systems is limited. The book discusses different characteristics of related languages with rich examples and draws connections between two problems: translation for related languages and transliteration. It shows how linguistic similarities can be utilized to learn MT systems for related languages with limited data. It comprehensively discusses the use of subword-level models and multilinguality to utilize these linguistic similarities. The second part of the book explores methods for machine transliteration involving related languages based on multilingual and unsupervised approaches. Through extensive experiments over a wide variety of languages, the efficacy of these methods is established. Features Novel methods for machine translation and transliteration between related languages, supported with experiments on a wide variety of languages. An overview of past literature on machine translation for related languages. A case study about machine translation for related languages between 10 major languages from India, which is one of the most linguistically diverse country in the world. The book presents important concepts and methods for machine translation involving related languages. In general, it serves as a good reference to NLP for related languages. It is intended for students, researchers and professionals interested in Machine Translation, Translation Studies, Multilingual Computing Machine and Natural Language Processing. It can be used as reference reading for courses in NLP and machine translation. Anoop Kunchukuttan is a Senior Applied Researcher at Microsoft India. His research spans various areas on multilingual and low-resource NLP. Pushpak Bhattacharyya is a Professor at the Department of Computer Science, IIT Bombay. His research areas are Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning and AI (NLP-ML-AI). Prof. Bhattacharyya has published more than 350 research papers in various areas of NLP.

This comprehensive handbook, written by leading experts in the field, details the groundbreaking research conducted under the breakthrough GALE program--The Global Autonomous Language Exploitation within the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), while placing it in the context of previous research in the fields of natural language and signal processing, artificial intelligence and machine translation. The most fundamental contrast between GALE and its predecessor programs was its holistic integration of previously separate or sequential processes. In earlier language research programs, each of the individual processes was performed separately and sequentially: speech recognition, language recognition, transcription, translation, and content summarization. The GALE program employed a distinctly new approach by executing these processes simultaneously. Speech and language recognition algorithms now aid translation and transcription processes and vice versa. This combination of previously distinct processes has produced significant research and performance breakthroughs and has fundamentally changed the natural language processing and machine translation fields. This comprehensive handbook provides an exhaustive exploration into these latest technologies in natural language, speech and signal processing, and machine translation, providing researchers, practitioners and students with an authoritative reference on the topic.

This book is about the limits of machine translation. It is widely recognized that machine translation systems do much better on domain-specific controlled-language texts (domain texts for short) than on dynamic general-language texts (general texts for short). The authors explore this general domain distinction and come to some uncommon conclusions about the nature of language. Domain language is claimed to be made possible by general language, while general language is claimed to be made possible by the ethical dimensions of relationships. Domain language is unharmed by the constraints of objectivism, while general language is suffocated by those constraints. Along the way to these conclusions, visits are made to Descartes and Saussure, to Chomsky and Lakoff, to Wittgenstein and Levinas. From these conclusions, consequences are drawn for machine translation and translator tools, for linguistic theory and translation theory. The title of the book does not question whether language is possible; it asks, with wonder and awe, why communication through language is possible.

The use of the computer in translating natural languages ranges from that of a translator's aid for word processing and dictionary lookup to that of a full-fledged translator on its own. However the obstacles to translating by means of the computer are primarily linguistic. To overcome them it is necessary to resolve the ambiguities that pervade a natural language when words and sentences are viewed in isolation. The problem then is to formalize, in the computer, these aspects of natural language understanding. The authors show how, from a linguistic point of view, one may form some idea of what goes on inside a system's black box, given only the input (original text) and the raw output (translated text before post-editing). Many examples of English/French translation are used to illustrate the principles involved.