Whats so hard about translation

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Whats so hard about translation?

• Ed Kenschaft
• University of Maryland
• UMIACS, CLIP Lab

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Translation Needs (1)

• Assimilation
• News monitoring
• Intercepts, noisy documents
• High recall, low precision

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Translation Needs (2)

• Dissemination
• UN, EU
• Commercial documentation
• Bible translation
• High recall precision

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Translation Needs (3)

• Emergency
• Military
• Medical
• Disaster relief
• High precision, moderate recall

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SIL International

• Faith-based Christian organization
• Partner with speakers of languages that have
  never been written down
• Purposes
• preserve the language and culture
• document the language for study
• translate the Bible and community development
  materials
• Documented 1400 languages in 70 countries

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Challenges 1

• Ultra-low-density languages
• mostly unwritten
• no large (or small) parallel corpora
• no Bible for bootstrapping

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Challenges 2

• Untrained translators
• 6th grade education
• One trained linguist for 10 languages

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Challenges 3

• Exceedingly rich domain of discourse
• approximates all of natural language
• Genres
• historical narrative
• dialog
• poetry
• personal letters
• Topics
• business, politics, sex, relationships, diet
• no controlled vocabulary

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Challenges 4

• Demand for 100 accuracy/fluency
• Life-changing lessons
• Easy to misinterpret

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Challenges 5

• Nearly endless variety of target languages
• 6800 languages
• 1400 written, 5400 unwritten
• half will survive next century
• 2000-3000 remaining

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Linguistic Variation

• Phonological variation
• Morphological variation
• three-boys-shot-arrows-at-the-gazelle
• Syntactic variation
• grammatical markers (e.g. dual, causative)
• discourse markers (e.g. topic/focus)
• honorifics

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Cultural Variation

• Cleanse me with hyssop, and I will be
  clean wash me, and I will be whiter than
  snow.(Psalm 517, NIV)
• What is hyssop?
• What is snow?
• What does it mean to be white?

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Cultural Variation

• Cleanse me with a plant indigenous to the lands
  of the ancient Near East, used in Jewish
  religious ceremonies, and I will be whiter than
  the precipitation that falls like rain when the
  weather is very cold, which indicates a state of
  moral purity.

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Intelligibility ? Fidelity (1)

• Moses had horns.

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Intelligibility ? Fidelity (2)

• Where there is no vision, the people perish.
  (Proverbs 2918a, KJ21)

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Intelligibility ? Fidelity (2)

• Where there is no vision, the people perish.
  (Proverbs 2918a, KJ21)
• When people do not accept divine guidance, they
  run wild. (Pr 2918a, NLT)

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Waste of Time?

• Can a computer solve all these problems?
• Not on your life
• Can a computer replace a translator?
• Limited domains only
• What can it do?
• Word-processing
• Data storage analysis
• First draft?

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General Approach

• CAT vs. MT
• Linguistically informed systems
• Supervised learning
• Exploit all available resources
• SL resources
• Existing TL data

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Data Representation

• Text encoding
• Unicode
• Fonts
• Graphite
• Interlinear text
• LinguaLinks, Toolbox, FieldWorks

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Elicitation Analysis

• Elicit syntactic morphological data
• AVENUE, EXPEDITION
• Elicit word lists for language survey
• WordSurv

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SL Resources

• Related language adaptation
• CARLA
• Projection across word alignment
• GIZA, Multi-Align, Parser Projection

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NLG

• Rich interlingua
• TBTA (Tod Allman)
• Statistical fluency enhancement
• (Sebastian Varges)

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Evaluation

• Need for automation
• Multiplying documents
• Shortage of experts
• BLEU
• How well does it work?
• What does it mean?
• METEOR
• Stresses recall

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The Limits of NLP

• Who knows?