Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT (not to be confused with computer-aided translation, machine-aided human translation MAHT and interactive translation) is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates the use of software to translate text or speech from one natural language to another.

On a basic level, MT performs simple substitution of words in one natural language for words in another, but that alone usually cannot produce a good translation of a text, because recognition of whole phrases and their closest counterparts in the target language is needed. Solving this problem with corpus and statistical techniques is a rapidly growing field that is leading to better translations, handling differences in linguistic typology, translation of idioms, and the isolation of anomalies.

Current machine translation software often allows for customisation by domain or profession (such as weather reports), improving output by limiting the scope of allowable substitutions. This technique is particularly effective in domains where formal or formulaic language is used. It follows that machine translation of government and legal documents more readily produces usable output than conversation or less standardised text.

Improved output quality can also be achieved by human intervention: for example, some systems are able to translate more accurately if the user has unambiguously identified which words in the text are names. With the assistance of these techniques, MT has proven useful as a tool to assist human translators and, in a very limited number of cases, can even produce output that can be used as is (e.g., weather reports).

source: wikipedia

Statistical machine translation (SMT) is a machine translation paradigm where translations are generated on the basis of statistical models whose parameters are derived from the analysis of bilingual text corpora. The statistical approach contrasts with the rule-based approaches to machine translation as well as with example-based machine translation.

Benefits

The most frequently cited benefits of statistical machine translation over traditional paradigms are:

• Better use of resources
• There is a great deal of natural language in machine-readable format.
• Generally, SMT systems are not tailored to any specific pair of languages.
• Rule-based translation systems require the manual development of linguistic rules, which can be costly, and which often do not generalize to other languages.

More natural translations

• Rule-based translation systems are likely to result in Literal translation. While it appears that SMT should avoid this problem and result in natural translations, this is negated by the fact that using statistical matching to translate rather than a dictionary/grammar rules approach can often result in text that include apparently nonsensical and obvious errors.

source: wikipedia.org