Equivalence Vs. Translation Equivalence In MT

The equivalence theory, as an important component of translation theory, has always been a central issue of translation study. This paper starts with a brief review of the development of the equivalence theory, from the Tytler's three Laws of Translation, which first embodied the idea of the equivalence theory, to Catford, Nida and Toury who have developed this theory by endeavoring to interpret it from different perspectives. But almost all the scholars seem to have reached an agreement that equivalence can only be relative, without being able to achieve the same rigid logic as in Physics and Mathematics, which has been determined by the unique characteristics of languages themselves. If we make a close study of the research by Catford who was the first to analyze the equivalence by using linguistic rules, Nida who put forward the dynamic equivalence theory and Toury who regards it both as a theoretical and empirical one, it can be seen that scholars have gradually grasped the nature of the equivalence theory. Based upon the research of the previous scholars, Chinese scholar Prof. Qiu Maoru proposes a new formula of the equivalence theory. Prof. Qiu's equivalence theory regards 'equivalence' and'translation equivalence'respectively as theoretical base and practical objective or criterion, which are closely related, forming an integrated system. This paper aims at using Prof. Qiu's formula to evaluate and test the functions of modern machine translation software. The author of this paper holds that by exploring this formula to test the concerned software, the gaps between translation theory and actual performance can be examined.Machine translation is the application of computers to the task of translating texts from one natural language to another. Machine translation is a cross-disciplinary field which concerns computational science, linguistics, anthropology and psychology. The paper also reviews the development of machine translation at a general level. After great efforts devoted in the past decades, machine translation has gained ground impressively. As an assisting tool, the performance of machine translation is acceptable to most people, and the prosperous development of such software justifies that.Machine translation software such as Systran, Logomeida and Power Translator abroad and Kingsoft FastAIT, Dongfangkuaiche, Dr Eye and Yaxin Cat home have won great popularity in translation market. Most of the full text machine translation software, however, provides translation versions which are barely satisfactory in accuracy and...