Machine translation: The Missing Links in Global Communication Globalization of the business environment sounds a very profitable venture. However for the organizations, this is a multifaceted challenge. Besides, managing the widespread business with all its nitty-gritty across various nations, the top management also needs to handle the multicultural and multilingual workforce as well as the customers. Being communicative on a global level helps organizations get local support.
It is now a virtual reality that the use of English language as a medium of web communications is slowly decreasing. The cyberspace being occupied by e-commerce companies tend to maximize their profits through multilingual communication. These e-commerce companies in their effort to maximize global revenues, target their markets with localized web content. Product features and specification, data sheets, FAQ’s , testimonials and customer service when offered in multiple languages helps to gain global support, build brand loyalty while cutting down on advertisement and overhead costs.
Customizing products and manuals for the different markets is not a new concept. The IT industry has been developing, customizing and translating software and manuals for various markets with the help of human translators. However with the advent of the World Wide Web, the localization process has gone online. Today, companies in culturally sensitive locations make use of human translation talents in combination with machine translation technologies. Survey reports have shown a growth of nearly 86 million websites within two-year period resulting in the large demands for multilingual web content. Translation of such vast content into various languages is possible with the help of machine translation software.
Machine translation software with domain specific subjects is the trusted translation facilities for both small and medium enterprises as well large business houses. Machine translation systems can translate content between two or more languages. A bilingual system translates only between two particular languages, whereas multilingual systems translated between pairs of languages. Nevertheless the innumerable website content and other documents translated every other day, causes security concerns for the online translation service.
Machine translation is carried out through various methods,路 Direct Machine Translation Approach 路 Interlingua Approach 路 Transfer approach 路 Empirical Machine translation approach which would include statistical machine based translation, Example based MT and language model
Out of all these methods, the Statistical machine translation depends on the statistical modeling of the words in the target language and its equivalences in the source language. This paves way for solutions to vague problems. The language model on the other hand ensures grammatically correct translations.
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