Automated Simultaneous Interpretation: Hints of a Cognitive Framework for Machine Translation

Abstract

This discussion paper presents and analyses the main conceptual differences and similarities between the human task of simultaneous interpretation and the statistical approach to machine translation. A psycho-cognitive model of the simultaneous interpretation process is reviewed and compared with the phrase-based statistical machine translation approach. Some interesting differences are identified and their possible implications on machine translation methods are discussed. Finally, the most relevant research problems related to them are identified.