why do computer-based translators have so much trouble going between Chinese and English? Can’t someone have come up with an efficient algorithm by now for making sense between the two?
In: Technology
Translation is hard. You can’t directly translate each word, you must first understand the meaning of a sentence to translate. So in order to translate from Language A to Language B you must first be able to understand A (that is, extract meaning from the words).
This is very difficult to do – even in English. Think of the following sentence:
> “I shot an elephant in my pajamas.”
Can you answer who is wearing the pajamas? There are 2 possible answers: me or the elephant.
It turns out that natural languages are very ambiguous (you can read sentences multiple ways), which makes ‘calculating’ their meaning very hard, which in turn makes translation very hard. And ambiguity is just one of the many difficulties of natural language processing (the part of computer science dedicated to understanding languages).
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