• Linguistics and Language -> Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing

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Do language rules have an impact on the accuracy of machine translations?

Stephania MacKeague

Well, as far as I can tell, language rules can definitely have an impact on the accuracy of machine translations. I mean, think about it - if a machine doesn't understand the grammar or syntax of a language, how can it accurately translate it?

But at the same time, I'm not exactly an expert on machine translations or linguistics, so I don't wanna act like I know everything. There could very well be other factors at play that I'm not aware of.

One thing I do know though is that even if a machine translation is technically accurate according to language rules, it might not convey the intended meaning or emotion behind a message. Like, if I say "I'm feeling blue" in English, a machine might translate that directly into another language as "estoy sintiendo azul" or something like that. But that doesn't really make sense in the other language, because "feeling blue" in English means feeling sad or down, not literally feeling the color blue.

So yeah, I guess what I'm trying to say is that language rules are important for machine translations to be accurate, but they're not the only thing that matters. There's also context, idioms, and other cultural factors that machines might struggle to understand.

At the end of the day, I think it's still best to rely on human translators whenever possible. Machines might be getting better at translating, but they still can't beat the intuition and cultural knowledge of a human being. But that's just my opinion - I'm sure others might disagree with me!