Abstract
A translation is generally taken to be a text that expresses the same meaning as another text in a different language. But the products of the best translators reflects a different, if more illusive, goal. I will seek a somewhat more adequate characterization of translation as it is actually practiced and discuss its consequences for machine translation.
Biography
Martin Kay is a professor of linguistics and computer science at Stanford University. For many years, he was also a research fellow at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. He made a number of fundamental contributions to computational linguistics, including chart parsing, unification grammar, and applications of finite-state technology, notably in phonology. He has been an intermittent worker on, and skeptical observer of, machine translation since 1958.