Báo cáo khoa học: An Electronic Computer Program for Translating Chinese into English

General Considerations The procedure known as translation consists in the expression, through the medium of the target language, of that information which is conveyed by the text in the source language. We shall not consider here the conveyance of anything apart from "information" in the narrow sense.
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Báo cáo khoa học: "An Electronic Computer Program for Translating Chinese into English" [Mechanical Translation, vol.3, no.1, July 1956; pp. 14-18]An Electronic Computer Programfor Translating Chinese into EnglishA. F. Parker-Rhodes General Considerations cognized, except to emphasize that from social and moral considerations the process ought ul- timately to be mechanized, and not relegated, as The procedure known as translation consists some have suggested, to a semi-skilled opera-in the expression, through the medium of the tor, which would merely replace a highly edu-target language, of that information which is con- cated translator by a less developed type ofveyed by the text in the source language. We shall worker.not consider here the conveyance of anything apart The symbols in the source text, together withfrom information in the narrow sense. their ordering-relations, contain all the informa- We have further to consider that the information tion available. The semantic content of theselatent in the source text may not all be relevant two kinds of item may be interchanged as betweenfor the purposes of the exercise. Languages source and target languages. For example, wediffer considerably in the kinds of information have:which they consider as relevant. For example,in English we cannot convey any verbal concept tinglfang2tsu fang2tsu ting1 Chinesewithout at the same time adding information English top house top of houseabout when the action took place relative both tothe moment of speaking and the moment of re- the relation which is expressed in the Chineseference. In Chinese on the other hand all this text by an ordering relation, is expressed inextra information is regarded as irrelevant. English by the addition or omission of a word.Differences between relevant and irrelevant in- In the case of closely-related languages suchformation are not only due to differences in lin- cases may be relatively few, but in general theguistic habit, but may be due to the common effect of this interchangeability will be to makehuman tendency to include irrelevant matter the distinction between words and word-rather than to risk leaving out anything of im- orderings a nuisance. One stage of our processportance. Theoretically, a sufficient transla- must therefore be to reduce all items of infor-tion could be defined as one which conveyed all mation, however conveyed in the source, to athe relevant and none of the irrelevant informa- common form. This stage I call catataxy.tion. But this would be a poor aim for a com- There are two main ways of doing this. Theputer program, (a) because when the same ir- first is the lexical, the second the algorith-relevancies are present in both languages, mic. Lexical methods aim to list all the re-trouble is saved by letting them pass, and (b) levant forms, be they words or word-orderings,the rigorous pruning of, for example, English and to record for each listed item an appropri-tenses, would lead to an undesirable pidgin ate equivalent in the target language. [An ex-effect which can in fact fairly easily be avoided. ample of the application of lexical methods to We therefore aim instead at carrying over all catataxy is described by Mr. Richens]. On thethe details which do not add to the operational other hand, algorithmic methods seek to pre-labor involved, and as little as is necessary ...