A Basic Consideration on the Theoretical Framework for Machine Translation of Natural Language

The usefulness of machine translation (MT) seems to have regained public attention in this highly computerized society, and active research projects concerning the subject are currently under way especially in the E. C., Canada and Japan. Now, some strong theoretical foundations must be established to have MT develop soundly. But, so far, excessive attention seems to have been paid to researcher's intuition and to his personal verbal experience. Much more attention should be paid to the linguistic facts and the results of theoretical considerations concerning linguistic translation. This paper is intended to contribute along these lines. First, the history of MT is briefly reviewed from the viewpoint of translation theory. A theoretical consideration of translation proposed by a French linguist G. Mounin is then summarized. Finally, a new thoretical framework is presented to aid in a sound development of MT.