About the Possibilities of Machine Translation Systems

The topic of machine translation abilities is quite hot these days

Machine translation systems often amaze us with the quality of their product, both brilliant and horrible. Mr. Translator by Tencent, for instance, made a fool of itself.

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As of today, the biggest issue about machine translation lies in reproducing the syntax of the source language in the sentence in the target language. But people do it in another way. We decode the phrase's meaning in the source language first, and then encode the meaning using the target language.

Generally speaking, the underlying issue of machine translation systems in their current state is failing to work with the meaning. When they give a wonderful text, it is no sign of their excellence in translation. It is a sign of their excellence in imitation. Hence, there is a question of whether it is just to recognize an imitation system as artificial intelligence.