Machine translation: a critical look at the performance of rule-based and statistical machine translation

Abstract

The essay provides a critical assessment of the performance of two distinct machine translation systems, Systran and Google Translate. First, a brief overview of both rule-based and statistical machine translation systems is provided followed by a discussion concerning the issues involved in the automatic and human evaluation of machine translation outputs. Finally, the German translations of Mark Twain’s The Awful German Language translated by Systran and Google Translate are being critically evaluated highlighting some of the linguistic challenges faced by each translation system.

Keywords

• rule-based machine translation
• statistical machine translation
• evaluation of machine translation output