An Introduction to Machine Translation

The translation of foreign language texts by computers was one of the first tasks that the pioneers of computing and artificial intelligence set themselves. Machine translation is again becoming an important field of research and development as the need for translations of technical and commercial documentation is growing well beyond the capacity of the translation profession. This is the first textbook of machine translation, providing a full course on both general machine translation systems characteristics and the computational linguistic foundations of the field. Machine Translation assumes no previous knowledge of the field and provides the basic background information to the linguistic and computational foundations of the subject. It is an invaluable text for students of computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and information science.