Why Technology Is Key to Overcoming the Language Barrier (Jonathan Lichtman, senior vice president of SAIC): "The two main approaches to machine translation are generally rule-based (RBMT) and statistical (SMT). RBMT uses manually programmed rules to translate one language to another. SMT involves the use of previously translated content to determine which words and phrases have the highest possibility of conveying the correct meaning. Both have advantages and disadvantages, but by combining the two approaches together in the same engine — a hybrid approach — language pairs can be developed faster and with less pre-translated “training” data.
That is an important leap in translation technology because it addresses two main barriers to the automation and accuracy of a language pair: not having enough translated data available and the constant evolving nature of language."
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