The Rosetta characteristics

Abstract

This chapter will summarise and discuss the characteristics of the method of compositional translation that has been presented in the previous chapters. This method has been used for the development of the Rosetta machine translation systems since 1981 and will be referred to often as the ‘Rosetta approach or method’. The Rosetta characteristics will be compared with characteristics and notions of other important machine translation approaches or theories. The comparison will be made at a theoretical level and will not involve the actual performance of particular systems and only aspects within the limited goals formulated in Chapter 1 will be discussed. Sometimes, specific machine translation systems will be mentioned as examples, but this chapter does not offer a review of existing machine translation systems. For such a review, the reader is referred to, for example, Hutchins (1986) and Hutchins and Somers (1992).