Download - Российский комитет Программы ЮНЕСКО ...

Promoting the use of a language must take place at every level: educational,
administrative, scientific and technical, even for leisure, and in the regional or
national bodies concerned. It must take place basically at the level of the access
of languages to technology.
Machine Translation
Of all the language technologies, those whose evolution has been followed most
closely are those related to machine translation. As language is perceived to be
what sets the human species apart, the thought that a machine might replace us
– or even go further than us – in the major linguistic and cognitive exercise that
is translation cannot fail to awaken deep-seated fears. And yet, after many years
of failure, we are apparently not so far off the goal … at least, for a few pairs of
privileged languages and still in the field of specialized translation which, we must
recall, concerns between eight and nine of every ten pages translated in the world.
If new public programmes do emerge with the aim of democratizing the
use of machine translation and favouring language pairs that have not been
studied in any depth until now, it is also at the root of competition between
businesses. Thus, the United States administration sees it more as a way of
making businesses more competitive 16 , on the grounds that on average 52 %
of consumers would not buy a product not described in their own language,
according to a study carried out in 2006 in eight developed countries.
However, although everything seems to indicate that machine translation will
be de facto integrated into all our applications, and although the quality seems
to be quite satisfactory for some language pairs and the outlook broader in
terms of the languages concerned, when it comes to most of the pairs treated,
quality is lacking, and in any case concerns barely 60 of the world’s languages.
The geo-linguistic imbalance is clearly visible in machine translation. Although
it is reaching maturity, although it is effective, although it is profitable, it only
concerns very few languages, mostly used in North America and Europe, and to
a lesser extent China and Japan, and the rest of the world is disregarded.
As the most effective systems derive their performance from the corpora
already existing (thanks to “translation memories” and systems that process
statistics) we can see the challenges that persist for languages with small
written corpora.
To return to the Romance languages, although they are suitably equipped 17 ,
developments are still needed to give full satisfaction both to machine
16
See the final paragraph of the document presenting the White House’s Innovation Strategy:
.
17
Namely Catalan, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian. Galician is finding it hard to find
satisfaction despite various initiatives and the other Romance languages, for different reasons, are far from
being considered suitably equipped to be used in contexts of specialization.
78