On Digitalized Translation Criteria

Translation as a lasting and enduring human activity, has played an important role in promoting our civilization. Yet with the explosive development of science and technology in the contemporary society, tremendous information exchange has raised a new topic for it—non-human translation and various theories have been established including theories about Machine Translation (MT). Even though much has been achieved in MT, some still question the feasibility of MT. This paper intends to answer the question of the possibility of non-human translation from the viewpoint of digitalized translation criteria. The paper falls into five parts to consider the issue from five different viewpoints.The first chapter is the general background of the study and briefed 3 issues concerning the theoretical study of translation: a brief review on the present theoretical study of translation, the trend of digitalization in the present world and study of translation via relative sciences (concentrating on linguistics and psychology and mentions other sciences such as mathematics, philosophy, computer, logic etc).The second chapter redefined translation. First, it analyzes the university of human language and the reasons. There are six reasons for this: 1) the same physiological features, 2) the same material situations we depend on for living, 3)the same interrelations among ourselves, 4) the same objective and means for linguistic or non-linguistic expressions, 5) the same communicative functions of languages. Then it proceeds to redefine translation in two senses. In the macro sense, translation concerns rendering messages/information from one language to another or from verbal signals to non-verbal signals or vice versus, for social communication efficiency. In the micro sense, translation is a personal psychological process. The psychological apparatus of the translator is the decisive factor in the whole process. Thus, translation is defined as the activity and result of receiving information from verbal or non-verbal sources, visual or audio, human or non-human, and conveying it to others by comprehensible means on basis of analysis and selection. Then the general psychological process of human translation is analyzed, ranging from the establishment of a mental lexicon to word extraction and speech utterance. Then semantic and syntactic features of Chinese and English are briefly compared and the deficiency of traditional Chinese criteria for translation is discussed by assuming that the FEE criterion is more an ideal than criteria for translation as it cannot offer any significant assistance to the evaluation of a translation or to a translator.The third chapter discusses the present status of MT and the reasons for their problems. It begins with a brief definition of MT and distinguishes between two translation strategies: direct translation and indirect translation and penetrates the reasons for failure in MT, ranging from linguistic problems and computational problems. And after a brief comparison between human translation and MT, some typical models for MT and some leading MT systems are discussed in detail to observe their merits and demerits. These models are RBMT, CBMT/EBMT, SBMT, PBMT, TBM, etc, and Verbmobile is evaluated as one of the most successful MT systems. The fourth chapter discusses digitalized translation criteria. First, digitalized translation (DT) is defined. Then the philosophic basis for digitalized criteria is discussed and considers philosophic guidance an essential factor in successful study of non-human translation. The general procedures is introduced and discussed, including 1) a mental lexicon, which resembles human brain in the storage of vocabulary rather than in the alphabetic orders as in most dictionaries, 2) a whole set of mathematic modular grammar system, 3) an interlingua system characterized by numbered codesfor all semantic and syntactic items, 4) a writing system for each language concerned in the translation Supported by the above technological systems, the transferring procedures of DT is...