"adding value" by human post-editing. More will surely appear as the years go by. p> However, the Internet is having further profound impacts that will surely change the future prospects for machine translation. There are predictions that the stand-alone PC with its array of software for word-processing, databases and games will be replaced by Network Computers which would download systems and programs from the Internet at any time as required. In this scenario, the one-off purchase of individually packaged machine translation software or dictionaries would be replaced by remote stores of machine translation programs, dictionaries, grammars, translation archives or specialized glossaries which would obviously be paid for according to usage. It is should be to said, that such a change would have profound effect on the way in which machine translation systems are developed. p> Another profound impact of the Internet will concern the nature of the software itself. What users of Internet services are seeking is information in whatever language it may have been written or stored. Users will want a seamless integration of information retrieval, extraction and summarization systems with translation
In fact, it is possible that in next years there will be fewer "pure" machine translation systems (commercial or on-line) and many more computer-based tools and applications in which automatic translation is just one component. As a first step, it will surely not be long before all word-processing software includes translation as an in-built option. Integrated language software will be the norm not only for the multinational companies but also available and accessible for anyone from their own computer (desktop, laptop, notebook or network-based server) and for any device like television or mobile telephone which interfacing with computer networks.
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Spoken Language Translation
The most widely anticipated development of the next decade must be that of speech translation. When current research projects (ATR, C-STAR, JANUS, Verbmobil) were begun in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was known that practical applications were unlikely before the next century. The limitation of these systems to small domains has clearly been essential for any progress, such are the complexities of the task; but these limitations mean that, when practical demonstrations are made, observers will want to know when broader coverage will be realizable. There is a danger here that the mistakes of the 1950s and 1960s might be repeated; then, it was assumed that once basic principles and methods had been successfully demonstrated on small-scale research systems it would be merely a question of finance and engineering to create large practical systems. The truth was otherwise; large-scale machine translation systems have to be designed as such from the beginning, and that requires many man-years of effort. It is still true to say that the best written-language machine translation systems of today are the outcome of decades of research and development.
Whatever the high expectations, it is surely unlikely that we will see practical speech translation of significantly large domains for commercial exploitation for another twenty years or more. Far more likely, and in line with general trends within the field of written language machine translation, is that there will be numerous applications of spoken language translation as components of small-domain natural language applications, e.g. interrogation of databases (Particularly financial and stockmarket data), interactions in business negotiations or intra-company communication.
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Machine and Human Translation
In the past there has often been tension between the translation profession and those who advocate and research computer-based translation tools. But now at the beginning of the 21-st century it is already apparent that machine translation and human translation can and will co-exist in relative harmony. Those skills which the human translator can contribute will always be in demand.
Where translation has to be of "publishable" quality, both human translation and machine translation perform their roles. Machine translation is demonstrably cost-effective for large scale and/or rapid translation of (Boring) technical documentation, (highly repetitive) software localization manuals, and many other situations where the costs of machine translation plus essential human preparation and revision or the costs of using computerized translation tools are significantly less than those of traditional human translation with no computer aids. By contrast, the human translator is (and will remain) unrivalled for non-repetitive linguistically sophisticated texts (In literature or law), and even for one-off texts in specific highly-specialize...
