Machine translation: overview

Machine translation \u2013 the use of computers to translate automatically among human languages \u2013 is an alluring prospect, one that for more than 50 years has fascinated researchers, inspired idealists and opportunists, and provoked unease among professional translators. This article gives a broad survey of this diverse and active field. It begins with a description of the many challenging problems faced by designers of machine translation systems and explains why there appears to be slim hope of attaining human-level performance in the foreseeable future. With these problems in mind, this article examines the main symbolic and empirical translation methods, and tries to give a balanced picture of their strengths and weaknesses.Peer reviewed: YesNRC publication: Ye