Mihail Radu Solcan

  Machine Translation Errors: A Philosophical Examination

Presented at the Bucharest International Colloquium in Analytic Philosophy (May 21, 2006)

Abstract

This is the draft of a paper which treats machine translation as an experiment. It examines some types of negative results produced by this experiment. The paper starts with an analysis of machine translation systems. The components of these systems embody sophisticated natural language processing methods. They could cope in principle with obstacles raised by meaning and the knowledge of the world. The paper concludes that the main obstacle is the inability to read the mind of the author of a text. This should not be a problem if the human mind had a linguistic structure. The most plausible conclusion seems to be that the mind's structure is not linguistic.


Read the full text(pdf 479 KB).
During the discussion of the paper, Michael Detlefsen pointed out that it is important to take into account also the mind of the audience of the translation. I fully agree with this point.