Syllabus
1. Introduction: definition of MT wrt. other linguistic fileds and applications, basic typology of MT systems, brief history of MT since 1945. 2.
Linguistic probléms of MT and their solution: ambiguity, false friends, anaphora, quantifier scope etc. 3. Pre- and post-editing, controlled languiage and their influence on the translation quality. 4.
Various concepts of MT and their comparison: symbolic, EBMT, knowledge-based MT; transfer, interlingua, pivot langauge, translation memory. 5. Practical exploitation and evaluation criteria for MT systems evaluation: search for an efficient cooperation between a human and a system, evaluation of quality and economical profit. 6.
Introduction of experimental and available commercial systems.
Annotation
The course concerns the history and current trends in automated translation. It introduces individual methods, namely rule-based methods, knowledge-based methods and example-based mathods, in their historical context.
It will also introduce in detail some interesting translation systems (TAUM-METEO, Systran, Eurotra, ETAP), with a special attention devoted to the systems involving Czech (Ruslan, Česílko). The students will also learn about methods and systems used in the field of machine aided translation.