tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "An Electronic Computer Program for Translating Chinese into English"

General Considerations The procedure known as translation consists in the expression, through the medium of the target language, of that information which is conveyed by the text in the source language. We shall not consider here the conveyance of anything apart from "information" in the narrow sense. | Mechanical Translation July 1956 pp. 14-18 An Electronic Computer Program for Translating Chinese into English A. F. Parker-Rhodes General Considerations The procedure known as translation consists in the expression through the medium of the target language of that information which is conveyed by the text in the source language. We shall not consider here the conveyance of anything apart from information in the narrow sense. We have further to consider that the information latent in the source text may not all be relevant for the purposes of the exercise. Languages differ considerably in the kinds of information which they consider as relevant. For example in English we cannot convey any verbal concept without at the same time adding information about when the action took place relative both to the moment of speaking and the moment of reference. In Chinese on the other hand all this extra information is regarded as irrelevant. Differences between relevant and irrelevant information are not only due to differences in linguistic habit but may be due to the common human tendency to include irrelevant matter rather than to risk leaving out anything of importance. Theoretically a sufficient translation could be defined as one which conveyed all the relevant and none of the irrelevant information. But this would be a poor aim for a computer program a because when the same ir-relevancies are present in both languages trouble is saved by letting them pass and b the rigorous pruning of for example English tenses would lead to an undesirable pidgin effect which can in fact fairly easily be avoided. We therefore aim instead at carrying over all the details which do not add to the operational labor involved and as little as is necessary to inform the target text with a minimum of elegance. Catataxis The required information is supplied in the source text in the form of a simply-ordered series of symbols. In the case of Chinese these symbols are characters. I shall