Machine translation or machine-aided translation? —Our view on “machine translation”

Machine translation, a term which has been applied to the process of translation from one language to another since its birth, is quite misleading. For the general public, machine translation implies “close” translation(faithful to the content and style of the original), indistinguishable from the translation version by a competent human translator. This paper, by examining the nature and the process of translation, tends to tell the readers that the mechine—a computer—can not achieve the level of translation compared with the level of human translator, it can only serve as an aid to human translation.