Linguistic Aspects in Machine Translation

This paper will give a general overview of the venture that is machine translation with particular focus on linguistic aspects. It will display history of MT and will deal with some of the major issues in the realisation of MT like the difficulty of translating prepositions or integrating semantics, as well as the importance of real world knowledge. To illustrate these difficulties with examples on a basic level, a practice test with a moderately complex translation engine provided by Google has been carried out and will be explained. Finally, I am going to introduce three of the largest and most powerful translation machines currently in use. I will also give a brief over-view of methods of MT. The aim of this paper is to show that the realisation of the primal idea of machine translation in its original sense, which was to perform translation without human intervention (except during the construction phase of the system), is still markedly far away at present and machines are still unlikely to take over the jobs of human translators.