Research On Translation Paradigm Based On Machine Translation Systems

Paradigm first appeared in Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolution,referring to an accepted model or pattern and an object for further articulation and specification under new or more stringent conditions.Therefore,the translation paradigm is the translation conceptual system which is widely accepted and respected by the translation research community in a certain period of time.Besides,it serves as the common belief and action guide of the members of the community while the translation paradigm research has become an important subject in this field.Machine translation is a subsidiary of computational linguistics which aims to realize the translation from one natural language(source language)to another(target language).In short,it is closely related to the use of computer software for natural language translation.However,as an important research field of translation,especially the important part of translation practice,the combination of machine translation and translation theory is still weak and needs to be strengthened.Translation paradigm is one of the core concepts of translation theory,which will be adopted to guide the actual text operation in machine translation.An investigation from the perspective of machine translation will be able to provide a real and objective verification platform for the research of translation paradigm.This thesis takes the machine translation as an approach to the further research,and analyzes the studies on translation paradigm in different machine translation systems.First of all,by combing the existing research results and the applicable theoretical framework,this study points out that corpus translation research has introduced a new research paradigm for translation studies from an empirical perspective.Secondly,through the comparison of paradigm shift in traditional machine translation,statistical machine translation and computer-aided translation,this thesis has effectively confirmed the development trend that corpus paradigm prevails in machine translation.Finally,the basic evaluation on the feasibility and limitations of corpus paradigm in machine translation has been completed by evaluating the translation quality of TRADOS for practical English texts.Through the presentation of research design,this thesis primarily answers the following questions: 1)In the case of various types of translation paradigms,what kind of translation paradigm can effectively guide the machine translation with strong scientific and operational nature? 2)Is the choice of translation paradigm in machine translation systems relatively absolute and dominant? 3)Compared with the studies on translation paradigm in human translation,whether the choice of translation paradigm in machine translation is sufficient and enlightening?After the theoretical exposition and data analysis,major findings that have been obtained are as follows: 1)The paradigms of machine translation systems have changed from the traditional rule-based method to the statistical method based on corpus and then to a new hybrid method;in the entire course,the use of corpus ensures the operability of machine translation.2)The corpus-based translation paradigm is a powerful guide to the machine translation systems,providing a successful model and effective rules.3)The corpus-based translation paradigm makes us understand machine translation studies from a more comprehensive and objective perspective,so that translation theories can give full play to its potential in the translation practice.As mentioned above,this thesis is a breakthrough on the combination of the translation paradigm theory and the machine translation system in specific practical operation,which is of some innovative significance.The future research direction lies in two aspects: 1)The source of machine translation systems that serve as research samples is narrow and the quantity of those systems is limited.More extensive sources and larger number of research samples should be included to intensify the persuasion of statistical results.2)The version of translation software is somewhat old and the type is relatively simple;so,it is necessary to expand the research tentacles to achieve effective evaluation and comparison on a variety of machine translation software.