Arabic is a Tough Language to Crack

There is a lot of research now that is focused on automatic translation. Even though we have a number of success stories with most languages, the story is quite different when it comes to Arabic. Many may wonder why?

Arabic is a very challenging language to translate by machines because it requires long-distance reordering of words and has a very rich morphology. Arabic also is a context-centric language where the meaning is inferred from sentences and paragraphs rather than words. Arabic words can take a number of meanings and inherently lead to many interpretations. Lastly, the written form of the language is far different in structure and expression from the spoken form. So if we have a good machine translator for the written form, we must have another one with different rules for the spoken form. Now you know why it is not easy to perfect machine translation for Arabic.

Google research took a shot at creating a rules-based Arabic-English translator. They claim that their translator provides better and enhanced results. So I decided to take it for a test drive….. I think it is definitely better than other ones I have seen in the past, but it still needs a lot of improvement. The translation is kind of week where it provides some meaning but not the full idea. I tested it using simple sentences that have to do with daily mundane interactions.

Here is a link to the Google Beta translators page in case you want to try any of the translators.