Machine translation is one of the sub-fields of computational linguistics, which deals with the statistical or rule-based modeling of natural language.
As business goes global, there is a bigger and bigger need to provide multilingual content on websites, and to be able to communicate across languages. The Global Machine Translation Market is the product of this demand, and has become one of the fastest growing translation markets worldwide, with a projected CAGR of 23.53 percent from 2014-2019.
Machine translation process
Input Text
This is the first module in any machine translation system. The sentences are classified according to the degree of difficulty of translation.
Filtering
The source language text could contain graphics and figures that are not required to be translated. These images are filtered and only translation portions are kept.
Conversion
Conversion of long sentences into short sentences may be required for some systems. Eradicating or fixing punctuation marks and blocking material that is not required to be translated is done during the pre-editing stage.
Morphological Analysis
Morphological analysis determines words such as inflections, tense, number, and parts of speech and categorizes according to the type of translation required. This improves the accuracy level of the entire translation process.
Syntactic Analysis
Syntactic analysis is done to determine how words are grouped into classes called parts of speech, how the neighboring words are grouped into phrases, and the interconnectivity of words in a sentence.
Identification of Non-textual Content
Identification of remaining figures and graphics after analysis and fixing the untranslated matter. This identification helps in better accuracy of the translation. The separation of the non-textual matter is a very important part of the entire process as this step determines the final content output.
Quality Check
Post-editing is done to assure the optimum quality of translation. Post-editing is crucial, especially for translation of valuable information such as medical terminology.
Target Text
The final translated outcome of the entire process is the target text.
Need for More Content in More Languages is the Main Driver Behind Machine Translation
In the last few years, the global economy has witnessed the significant growth of emerging industries like manufacturing and power generation, which is generating a huge volume of content that needs translating. Machine translation has become crucial in a lot of these industries to quickly process and translate this content in order to make it available in regional languages and accessible to all users worldwide.
But as many benefits as there are to machine translation, accuracy is still a major issue.
As described above, the machine translation process uses a statistical approach to break down and translate text, but cannot understand the context and true meaning of the content. Machine translation might be able to break down sentences and discern meaning, but these systems still have very low accuracy compared with human translators.
Growing Need to Eliminate Language Barriers will Buoy Market Growth
However, despite issues with accuracy, the growing need to eliminate language barriers and connect users with different linguistic backgrounds is expected to play a major role in the growth of the Global Machine Translation Market during the forecast period.
