Essex University Create A Computer Capable Of Translating English Into Other Languages

Research funded as part of the Eurotra machine translation project.

Researchers from a team of ten at the University of Essex are shown working at computers as part of a language translation project. The approach is to break down each sentence through a computer programme which recognises the patterns of language structure and replace with an equivalent translation. It is acknowledged that this is complex and progress will be slow. Research Officer Andrew Betts gives an example of the ambiguities arising from French prepositions because a machine programme cannot understand the context in the way a human would do. Views of translation on computer screens and printouts. Improvements in computing have led to a revival of research with major project funding across the European Community. Senior Research Officer Lee Humphreys says they hope to develop a usable small-scale system over 3 years. They hope by the late 1990s they might be close to replacing the human translator with a computer. The reporter was Surrey Beddows for this video made to be shown in a news story on Anglia Television early evening news / magazine programme About Anglia.

Keywords

Language translation; Languages; Computers; Academic research

Additional Description

Eurotra was a machine translation project established and funded by the European Commission from 1978 until 1992. The project was motivated by one of the founding principles of the EU: that all citizens had the right to read any and all proceedings of the Commission in their own language. Andrew Betts worked as a Research Officer at the University of Essex from 1986 to 1990, focusing on the EUROTRA machine translation project.