Machine Translation of Natural Languages

Machine Translation is as old as the field of Computational Linguistics itself. It is also a problem that has been predicted to „be solved in the next five years“ many times, but in fact it is not yet solved today. Machine translation has been naively considered a simple problem solvable by simple statistical means, then studied in depth by complicated but unsuccessful detailed sets of rules trying to describe all details of natural language use, only to return to statistical approach on a completely different level, using a combination of linguistic analysis and powerful machine learning algorithms