SRF Global Translations: Machine Translation of Chinese Fails Because of Word Order Confusion
Word order in a sentence can often be very confusing for English into Chinese and Chinese into English machine translation. In Chinese, word order is often the only way of expressing grammatical meaning, according to KaiYu, SRF Global Translations' expert in Asian languages.
Simple translation software that proceeds on a word-by-word basis will render the sentence "We are going to eat in the morning," as "We go eat morning." More sophisticated software will attempt to reconstruct the context, often with random, if not pathetic results.
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