Yuhuan Jiang edited Word Based Models.md  over 10 years ago

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It is very intuitive to think of translation as a word-to-word process. Think of a Chinese person who does not know any English traveling in New York (or you can think about Tom Hanks in the movie _The Terminal_). When he looks at the sentence: .  However, the reality is always a lot crueler. If you take this verbatim approach every time you come across a foreign sentence, you'll easily end up with translations that are completely not understandable. There are several reasons for this. First of all, the word order in one language may be different from that in another. Take Japanese for example. In Japanese, the predicate is always at the end, while English has predicates in the middle of sentences between the subject and the object. If translates Japanese word by word with a Japanese-English dictionary, you'll probably hear sentences like these: "_Today I "_I Today  apple eat._", "_Igo to  the beach want._", to want to go._",  etc. And the second reason is that, a foreign word might have many possible translations. The Chinese word "智" could both mean _intelligence _or the country _Chile_.