Abstract of the Development of a Theoretical Basis for Machine Aids for Translation from Hebrew to English.

Chapter I, an introduction to machine translation of languages, contains a simplified description of electronic computing machines, and a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of machine translation research. A historical background of machine translation of languages is given, together with a description of various machine translation projects throughout the world, and the present state of the art is assessed. Chapter II presents a theory of translation that requires three structural grammars: a structural grammar of the source language (Hebrew), a structural grammar of the target language (English), and a transfer grammar that transforms the structural elements of the source grammar to those of the target grammar. Each grammar is discussed and illustrated together with its limitations and problems. An introduction to the subject of structural grammar is given, and the various types of structural grammars are described and illustrated. A context-sensitive, complex-constitutent, phrase-structure grammar is selected for the problems of machine translation from Hebrew to English; reasons for this selection are given. Methods for the evaluation of translation quality are described and a new simple method is developed and illustrated. Various problems of the transfer grammar are considered and solutions of the problems are presented and illustrated. (Author/AMM)