No, We Can't Translate 'Yes We Can'

Source: Google Blogoscoped
URL: http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2010-03-10-n43.html

Ten years ago, the best-available translation software analysed the source text to determine its structure: subject, object, nouns, verbs, phrases, etc. From the structure tree, a new text could be generated in the target language. The precise details of Google's translation algorithms are not published, but the structure tree is not the main mechanism. Instead, there is a corpus -- an enormous database of parallel works. These are works available in more than one language as a result of a previous human...