Wydawnictwo Naukowe Wyższej Szkoły Ekonomii i Informatyki w Krakowie
Abstract
Computer-aided translation is the oldest and at the same time the most prominent subject in the field of artificial intelligence. The idea of using computers to translate texts written in natural language is almost as old as the invention of the computer itself. At first it seemed easy to implement and it was expected that in a decade or so the profession of translator would finally disappear because only digital machines would do this kind of work. However, it took more than 60 years of intensive research for this dream to become a reality in modern times. A breakthrough in computer translation research was the application of computational techniques based on artificial neural networks using deep learning algorithms. In 2017, the translation service DeepL was launched, which is a computer program using deep learning in automatic translation. The program under consideration provides translation of very high quality between any pair of more than 20 languages. Among other things, the programme enables translation from and into Polish. The article presents a brief history of research on computer-aided translation, discusses the basic difficulties that had to be overcome on the way to building computer-aided translators, and discusses the basic approaches used in automatic translation. Finally, interesting results of experiments carried out with the program DeepL are presented, which prove its very high efficiency in translation between any pair of languages, regardless of the degree of their genetic affinity
