Machine Translation
To translate accurately, a machine must be able to understand the text. It must be able to follow the author's argument, so it must have some ability to reason. It must have extensive world knowledge so that it knows what is being discussed — it must at least be familiar with all the same commonsense facts that the average human translator knows. Some of this knowledge is in the form of facts that can be explicitly represented, but some knowledge is unconscious and closely tied to the human body: for example, the machine may need to understand how an ocean makes one feel to accurately translate a specific metaphor in the text. It must also model the authors' goals, intentions, and emotional states to accurately reproduce them in a new language. In short, the machine is required to have wide variety of human intellectual skills, including reason, commonsense knowledge and the intuitions that underlie motion and manipulation, perception, and social intelligence. Machine translation, therefore, is believed to be AI-complete: it may require strong AI to be done as well as humans can do it.
Read more about this topic: AI-complete, AI-complete Problems
Famous quotes containing the words machine and/or translation:
“All day long the machine waits: rooms,
stairs, carpets, furniture, people
those people who stand at the open windows like objects
waiting to topple.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“Translation is the paradigm, the exemplar of all writing.... It is translation that demonstrates most vividly the yearning for transformation that underlies every act involving speech, that supremely human gift.”
—Harry Mathews (b. 1930)