Translator – Fundamentals of Natural Language Processing
Translator
Text translation is the key capability of the translator workload in NLP.
Text translation is a cloud-based REST API part of the Translator service. It uses neural machine translation technology to translate text from the source language to the target language in real time in all of the languages it supports.
Getting rid of language barriers has become important as more businesses and people try to communicate with people from different cultures and parts of the world. Finding bilingual or even multilingual individuals to translate between languages is one approach. But this strategy might be hard to scale up if people don’t have these skills and there are a lot of different language pairs. Automated translation, commonly referred to as “machine translation,” is increasingly being used to address this issue.
Literal and Semantic Translation
During a literal translation, a word is transcribed into its adjacent word in the other language, and this is what machine translation looked like previously. Nonetheless, this procedure has its disadvantages. For one, there mightn’t be a parallel word in the target language. In other cases, the translation could be totally off point from what it was intended to be.
Things get a lot worse when the linguistic context of two languages has a gap for a lot of concepts. To mention one, we can say that “fermer la lumière” is a perfectly fine French sentence that tells its reader to switch off the light. However, when translated literally in English, the literal meaning changes to “close the light,” which would make no sense to even the most basic English speaker. Here, semantic translation is useful because the context of meaning is not lost while translating. A semantic translation of the former French sentence would be “turn off the light,” which is perfect and understandable.
The AI at work here should be adequate enough to contain the semantic meaning of words and sentences so as to make translations of even richer texts in other languages, such as poetry and prose, a lot easier and more accessible to read.