Machine translators of texts more or less satisfactorily compose the skeleton of the main translation at the expense of, as a rule, word-for-word processing of the text, and from several possible meanings of words, the commonly used one is chosen most often. Such a situation is unlikely to satisfy a specialist in a certain field (Chalenko, 1993, p.72).

In recent years, several dozens of software translation machines from one language to another have appeared on the software market. Let's try to analyze the latest versions of the most popular of them. The main problem is that translation made by a computer is still far from perfect, but the text obtained as a result of the work of an electronic translator allows in most cases to understand the essence of the document being translated. Further, this document can be corrected, having a basic knowledge of a foreign language and a good orientation in the subject area to which the information to be translated belongs.

One of the most famous machine translation programs on the Ukrainian market are STILUS, PARS, Language Master. These programs are WINDOWS applications that support Drag&Drop technology, OLE automation, have an operational help system, graphical dialog settings, as well as other window controls and options, which makes these programs really popular among users (Goodman, 1995, p.51).

Let's consider the criteria by which the above software products were compared.

• Installation/Uninstallation characterizes the possibility of installation and destruction of machine translation programs from the user's computer.
• Translation speed determines how quickly large text documents can be translated.
• The number of untranslated words characterizes dictionaries that accompany machine translation programs.
• The quality of the translation determines the grammatical correctness of the translation.
• Ease of setting up the program and dictionaries determines the friendliness of the user interface.
• Use on the network confirms the possibility of using the translator program for collective work.
• The documentation allows you to get basic concepts and theoretical knowledge about the program.
• Working with a Web browser makes it possible to perform operational translation of Web pages (Zelinsky, 1997, p.53).

It should be said that, despite the large number of criteria, the main thing remains, of course, the quality of the translation, so this criterion is the most important in the final evaluation. Let's consider three translators in turn.

Stylus 3.01.

Among all the machine translation programs under consideration, STILUS 3.01 is the most popular among users. This program is part of the Stilus Lingvo Office office suite. In the new version of this program, the set of translation commands in Word and Excel has been significantly expanded, support for the translation of the current paragraph, selected text, the entire text, uploading a document edited in STILUS. In addition, the new version has the ability, without downloading STILUS, to use any of the available translation directions, connect and disconnect specialized dictionaries, supplement and correct them, add words to the list of reserved words and view the list of unfamiliar words and phrases.

To work with this program, you must have a computer with a 386DX processor and higher, 8M RAM (16M recommended) and an installed Windows 95 or Windows NT 3.51 operating system (Russified version). Thus, we have a powerful machine translation program that supports Windows and MS Office technologies and provides translation quality suitable for today.

PARS 3.9.

The PARS 3.9 machine translation program for Windows is a further development of PARS for DOS, works as a Windows application and is compatible with well-known text editors.

This translator uses the 386th protected mode of the processor (i.e., it supports multitasking). The translation of texts prepared in popular text editors is performed while preserving the text format (fonts, tables, paragraphs, indents, etc.). PARS provides coherent translation within subject areas covered by dictionaries and supports English-Russian dictionaries and a Russian grammar dictionary. Users can connect dictionaries, create new dictionaries themselves, and modify existing ones directly from Word. The total volume of dictionaries is over 700,000 words.

The program is downloaded directly from Word automatically or at the user's request. In the process of translation, PARS allows you to use up to four dictionaries with their priority set, and provides the ability to translate the entire text or its fragment, enter new words or phrases directly into the dictionary from the text, separate multi-meaning words in the translation text with asterisks, which allows you to quickly and easily choose value that is more appropriate. This program is distinguished by a convenient and versatile setting of user dictionaries. The documentation accompanying the program allows you to quickly understand the working principles of this electronic translator.

For the correct operation of PARS, the following hardware and software are required: a computer with a 386DX processor and higher, 2 MB of RAM (4 MB is recommended), an operating environment of Windows 3. x or the Windows 95 operating system, and a Word text editor for Windows. So, we have a good, fast­acting machine translation program with convenient options for replenishing dictionaries and prioritizing their use.

Language Master 5.5.

One of the machine translations programs that recently appeared on the SOFT market of Ukraine can be considered Language Master. Currently, this translator program is intended for the preparation of texts in Ukrainian, Russian, and English languages or their combinations.

The work scheme of this program is based on the spelling check of the initial text, accounting for grammatical and semantic features of sentence construction. For this purpose, the spelling checker module (Spellchecker) and electronic dictionary (Assistant), document translator and translation module for a language pair are used. This machine translation program connects to any version of Word for Windows, meaning it does not have its own shell. This may be the reason for the low speed of this translator.

Four additional buttons of the Language Master program appear immediately in the Word toolbar during installation, using which you can control the translation process and configure the software. In addition, the Master submenu appears in the menu bar, from which you can also control the setting and the translation process.

Language Master requires a computer based on 486DX and higher, 4M RAM (8M recommended), Windows 3. x operating environment or Windows 95 or Windows NT operating system, Word text editor for Windows for smooth operation of Language Master.

Conclusion: thus, there is a rapidly developing machine translation program, but it does not have its own shell, which, perhaps, causes defects and limitations in working with it. At a basic level, the job of computer translation programs is to replace words or phrases from one language with words or phrases from another. However, then a problem arises, such a replacement cannot provide a high-quality translation of the text, because it requires the definition and recognition of words and entire phrases from the original language. This encourages scientific activity in the field of computer linguistics.

References:

1. Belov Yu. A., Protsenko V. S., Chalenko P.Y. (1993). Programming tools, 70­74.
2. Goodman J. (1995). Memory management for all. K.: Dialektika, 51-55.
3. Zelinsky S. (1997). I would learn English only for that. Computer magazine, 50-56.