Machine translation

Machine translation (MT) is the automatic translation from one human language to another by computers. There are multiple methods of accomplishing this, including:

• Statistical Methods
• Lexical lookup methods
• Grammar based methods
• Example based methods
• Semantic based methods

Given enough data, most of these methods work well enough for a native speaker of one language to get the gist of what is written by the other native speaker. The difficulty is getting enough data of the right kind to support the particular method. The large corpus of data needed for statistical methods to work isn't necessary for the grammar based methods, for example. But then, the grammar methods need a skilled linguist to carefully design the grammar that they use.