Human and machine translation

This chapter introduces the reader to translation and machine translation. It attempts to dispel some myths about translation, and stresses the importance of translators in creating equivalence between source and target texts. Ultimately the chapter aims to help readers construe human-produced translations as training data for machine translation. The chapter goes on to present some of the most useful distinctions made in machine translation: between types of machine translation systems and different uses of machine translation output. In particular, it attempts to explain contemporary machine translation as an application of the branch of artificial intelligence known as machine learning, and more specifically, of deep learning