Duisburger Arbeiten zur Sprach- und Kulturwissenschaft
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102
Following a welcome in Lithuanian and English to the guests and members on the occa- sion of the 10"’ anniversary of EFNIL, the history of this European language Organization is sketched. A brief survey of the sociolinguistic themes treated at previous Conferences and the state of the inajor projects is given, followed by an introduction (in German) to the general topic of the present Conference. The importance that translation and interpretation have for European language diversity and the individual national languages beside foreign language education of all Europeans is being stressed.
102
Communication across all language barriers has long been a goal of humankind. In recent years, new technologies have enabled this at least partially. New approaches and different methods in the field of Machine Translation (MT) are continuously being improved, modified, and combined, as well. Significant progress has already been achieved in this area; many automatic translation tools, such as Google Translate and Babelfish, can translate not only short texts, but also complete web pages in real time. In recent years, new advances are being made in the mobile area; Googles Translate app for Android and iOS, for example, can recognize and translate words within photographs taken by the mobile device (to translate a restaurant menu, for instance). Despite this progress, a “perfect” machine translation system seems to be an impossibility because a machine translation system, however advanced, will always have some limitations. Human languages contain many irregularities and exceptions, and consequently go through a constant process of change, which is difficult to measure or to be processed automatically. This paper gives a short introduction of the state of the art of MT. It examines the following aspects: types of MT, the most conventional and widely developed approaches, and also the advantages and disadvantages of these different paradigms.