Automatic Translation

Current attempts to automatically translate texts are doomed to failure for the simple reason that language evolves. Therefore the semantics, in other words the meaning of a text, depends crucially on the context in  which that text appears, but the context is not evident in the text itself. Chomsky provided a famous example of the phenomenon in the sentence

Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.

Chomsky probably meant this as an example of a grammatically correct English sentence which was not in fact meaningful. But the context is everything, and it doesn't take much of a poet to imagine a context in which the above sentence is in fact meanigful; try it.

The problem is that the text is an extensional representation of some intensional semantics. The intensional semantics are the semantics the author intended the text to represent. Now there are any number of ways the author (or poet) could have chosen to express that intensional meaning, and this is but one of them. However, the intensional meaning is not explicit in any one of those extensional texts.

Rather than banging our heads against the proverbial brick wall of translating informally written texts from one language to another, we could make some real progress by concentrating our efforts on defining formal languages to express the intensional semantics of what we wish to say. Then we could interpret those formal expressions of semantics as if they were computer programs, and thereby automatically generate the extensional expressions in any context where they are needed. That context will include not only the language in which they are written, but the particular period and style of expression.

Such formal expressions of intensional semantics could in principle be translated perfectly into any known written language. Furthermore, those translations could be formally proved to be faithful representations of the intended meaning of the texts.