Your definition of Language Translation seems very limited. What do you think the activity of all those people at the UN General Assembly providing, say Russian to English conversion of
spoken language, in close to real-time should be called? I'd say Language Translation.
Isn't that the difference between translator and interpreter?
In computer programming, translation is changing source code from the syntax and structure of one programming language to that of another while maintaining the end effect. Interpretation is executing the source code during translation.
My $0.02: I think an article about "language translation" (or just "translation") should concern the translation of natural languages by people into other natural languages; only the briefest of mentions of machine translation should be on that page. Machine translation is greatly interesting, particularly to Wikipedians (because so many Wikipedians are programmers), and a friend of mine makes a living designing machine translation systems. But translation properly so called (i.e., done by human beings) is a much older, more widespread, and more important topic than machine translation. Of course, we can (maybe already do?) have an article just on
machine translation and the many interesting problems it poses. Again, this is just my $0.02.
LMS
When I read the page "Language Translation" and it referred to preserving the meaning and tone, I saw no reason to think this was a about "programming language translation." In fact, I still don't. That is why I remarked on translation of "spoken language." Call this
interpretation if you want, it still belongs under natural language translation.
I agree with
LMS, that this page should be about natural language translation. Machine translation of languages belongs somewhere else, or with a more specific title. Mind you, I spent a number of years on machine transaltion of languages, and yet, I never saw this page as related to that discipline.
RoseParks
I was just thrusting in my 2¢ on what real-time conversion would be called, in answer to the first question. Long ago I had a multilingual teacher who described the difference in natural language terms, but I can barely remember that so I used the programming example. --Atlas_2091
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