Dec 2009, 2:43
What is automatic (machine) translation and why has not it displaced human translations?

Machine translation (MT) is understood as an automatic translation of the source text fed in a computer.
MT development has been going on for more than 50 years. By now computers can successfully analyze syntactic structures of sentences, but are unable to understand semantics of phrases and – most importantly – of the whole text. Since text is not just a set of words, lexemes or phrases, but an integral object deeply weaved with internal links between its elements and external links with the surrounding world, its understanding requires something greater than a combination of translations of its constituent parts.

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