Machine translation and human translation: Using machine translation engines and corpora for teaching and research

Machine translation and human translation often encounter the same difficulties at the level of the word and sentence. This chapter describes a methodology which encourages students to select examples of such problems from corpora, evaluate the performance of on-line machine translation engines with them, and compare the results with those of human translation. This has proved a way of providing training in linguistic analysis and the use of corpora as language resources in an interesting way. The methodology has been made possible by the project Linguateca, and the computational tools it develops also offer opportunities for research projects in the areas of human and machine translation, terminology extraction, corpus linguistics, contrastive linguistics and related areas.