SRF Global Translations: Machine Translation of Chinese Lacks Crucial Contextual Understanding
Machine translation limits and failures are especially evident between languages that do not share much cultural background, according to KaiYu, SRF Global Translations' expert in Asian languages. For example, when translating between English and Chinese, context understanding becomes more important than word semantics.
For example, there is no word for "Hello" in Chinese. The translator can choose to transliterate it as the sound "Hello", using Chinese characters to indicate the sound, but such a choice requires the reader to know in advance what "Hello" means in English. With Chinese audiences other than young generations, "Hello" is thus often translated as "How are you?", which works as "Hello" in most contexts.
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