Approaches to Machine Translation: A Review

Translation is the transfer of the meaning of a text from one language to another. It is a means of sharing information across languages and therefore essential for addressing information inequalities. The work of translation was originally carried out by human translators and its limitations led to the development of machine translators. Machine Translation is a subfield of computational linguistics that investigates the use of computer software to translate text or speech from one natural language to another. There are different approaches to machine translation. This paper reviews the two major approaches (single vs. hybrid) to machine translation and provides critique of existing machine translation systems with their merits and demerits. Several application areas of machine translation and various methods used in evaluating them were also discussed. Our conclusion from the reviewed literatures is that a single approach to machine translation fails to achieve satisfactory performance resulting in lower quality and fluency of the output. On the other hand, a hybrid approach combines the strength of two or more approaches to improve the overall quality and fluency of the translation.

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