Editing Dictionary-based machine translation (section)

== Parallel Text Processing ==
Douglas Hofstadter through his "Le Ton beau de Marot: In
Praise of the Music of Language" proves what a complex task translation is. The
author produced and analysed dozens upon dozens of possible translations for an
eighteen line French poem, thus revealing complex inner workings of syntax,
morphology and meaning.<ref name=":2">{{Cite book|title = Parallel Text Processing: Alignment and Use of Translation Corpora|journal = Computational Linguistics|volume = 27|issue = 4|pages = 592–595|publisher = Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers (Text, speech and language technology series, edited by Nancy Ide and Jean V´eronis, volume 13), 2000, xxiii+402 pp; hardbound |isbn=978-0-7923-6546-4|last = Jean V´eronis|s2cid = 14796449|doi = 10.1162/coli.2000.27.4.592|year = 2001}}</ref> Unlike most translation engines who choose a single
translation based on back to back comparison of the texts in both the source
and target languages, Douglas Hofstadter's work prove the inherent level of
error which is present in any form of translation, when the meaning of the
source text is too detailed or complex. Thus the problem of text alignment and
"statistics of language"<ref name=":2" /> is brought to attention.

This discrepancies led to Martin Kay's views on translation
and translation engines as a whole. As Kay puts it "More substantial successes
in these enterprises will require a sharper image of the world than any that
can be made out simply from the statistics of language use" [(page xvii)
Parallel Text Processing: Alignment and Use of Translation Corpora].<ref name=":2" /> Thus Kay
has brought back to light the question of meaning inside language and the
distortion of meaning through processes of translation.