Natural language translation – the past
Traditionally, Language Translation (LT) has been a very involved process—people have thought that only humans can really logically translate from one language to another. It requires a uniquely human representation and understanding of the contents of a sentence, paragraph, or document. LT is more than just understanding sentiment—it's about recreating the input data in a different style. It's complex due to the various words, word types, and sentence structures of different languages, and for the following reasons:
- Some words don't have gender attributes
- Some have gender attributes for everything—a chair can be masculine or feminine in German
- Most don't have the word you
- Most languages, such as French, don't have a literal translation of the English word for fun
Therefore, for the past few decades, the majority of research on LT techniques were best effort—they'd do word-to-word or phrase-to-phrase translations, but they wouldn't create natural-sounding...
