NSF grant to explore philosophical perspectives of human and machine translation

A new interdisciplinary project at the interface of philosophy, linguistics, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence seeks to explore the complicated relationship between human and machine translation. The project, led by professor of philosophy Yuri Balashov, is supported by an NSF Scholar's Award.

"Translation from one language into another is a difficult and cognitively intense process requiring a broad set of linguistic and non-linguistic skills ranging from search techniques, memory load control, multitasking, rapid mental set switching, and other executive functions to the abilities to survey and keep in the air many syntactic, morphological, semantic, and pragmatic parameters of both languages, which are often interrelated in complicated ways," Balashov wrote. "Although this occupation has long been the subject of translation studies – a diverse and heterogeneous academic discipline blending into literary criticism on one side and neuroscience on the other, – philosophers have rarely ventured into it."

The project is a case study in the history and current state of translation technologies conducted from the complementary perspectives of three theoretical disciplines and informed by first-hand knowledge and experience. The project includes: (i) a theoretical component focused on the representation of linguistic meaning in various human, machine, and hybrid human-machine translation systems ; and (ii) a practical component focused on the different forms of human-machine symbiosis in technical (non-literary) translation areas and ways of improving them.

"I see the two aspects of the project as interrelated: a better understanding of the theoretical (cognitive, linguistic, philosophical) foundations of human and machine translation may suggest new ways of leveraging their strengths and overcoming their weaknesses; on the other hand, a close look at how human and machine translation interact in real life may offer new insights into how physical systems represent linguistic meaning and, more ambitiously, what linguistic meaning consists in," Balashov said.

Balashov received a Study in a Second Discipline Fellowship which allowed him to audit classes in linguistics and advance work on the project.

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