Understanding machine translation

A serious impediment to spreading new information, ideas, and knowledge is the language barriers imposed by the different languages spoken worldwide. Despite the cultural richness brought to our global heritage, they can pose significant hurdles to efficient human communication. This chapter focuses on machine translation (MT), which aims to alleviate these barriers. MT is the process of automatically converting a piece of text from a source into a target language without human intervention. This task is more than a modest goal and demands the synergy of various emerging fields to address the peculiarities of human language. For instance, with their inherent ambiguity and flexibility, you can expect multiple situations where more than one best translation exists. Despite many prominent MT systems appearing in recent years, the technology is not new. In the 50s, it was part of the first computing applications. Nevertheless, significant progress has...