Neural machine translation (NMT) and the way it works

Neural machine translation are an integral part of machine translation and translation tools. It is one software that gets used to translate words from one language to another. The popular and well-known examples of the NMT are Google Translate, Baidu, etc. These work with the internet and services can be availed after being online.

If you need a company that specialize in providing comprehensive and accurate Financial translations that enable organizations to communicate their message and gain a competitive advantage across global markets.

Neural machine translation services is important as the technology which is getting advanced every passing day has new requirements every now and then. It asks a lot of multinational institutions to go for the NMT engines so that it can help in internal and external interactions and communications.

How does it work

NMTs contain all types of machine translation with the artificial neural network. The network gets integrated to use and predict a sequence of numbers while having previous numbers. When it comes to translation, every word from the source language or input sentence gets encoded as a numerical figure making it ready for the neural network and having a sequence of numbers that represent translated target sentence which is our target language. It is quite technical and tough for some fields such as marketing translation services to interpret.

An example of it from English to Chinese would be like this

“I am a dog” will be encoded into numbers 251, 3245, 953, and 2. The numbers which are 251, 3254,953,2 would be put into a neural translation model and the end product would be 2241, 9242,98,6342.

This number 2241, 9242, 98, 6342 then further goes to Chinese this way 我是只狗“.

This example starts another debate about how the translation model work.

Formula of NMT

There is a complex mathematical formula that works and represents a neural network. This formula works on the strings of numbers as input and outputs and further results in a string of numbers. Parameters of the neural network get created and refined with the training of the network and a lot of sentence pairs such as English and Chinese pair. This pair modifies the neural network a little as it runs through every sentence pair using an algorithm called back-propagation.

This whole process results in the most accurate and precise translation of input numbers into outputs with millions of sentence pairs in the backup.

Neural networks

In simple words neural networks enable complexity. This is all related to machine translation services. These networks have a huge number of parameters with weights and biases and nodes are there between these two to make it flexible for the high-intensity data to get fit and train complex models. The complexity of the model enables to generalize of the whole to large volumes of examples including the digestion of millions of language pairs.

Using cases of NMT

NMT technology is good enough to get implemented in any language pair including all the obsolete languages. It also works for every domain be it about the media or film translation services. The NMT technology can further be tuned and adapted as per the particular styles and language types. 

For instance formal, US English, UK English, scientific medical, and many more. Training data is primarily important for the NMTs and these are dependent on it. It is important to train the neural network as it further mimics the data. A lot of industry-specific niches and custom-developed machine translation models incorporate neural and statistical methods to squeeze performance for the clients.

Disadvantages of the NMT

  • Neural machine translation also known as NMT has this big disadvantage inconsistency. As neural networks get trained on the basis of the volumes of data so these are not easy to control. These are barely tamed. The software may translate a term such as ‘restaurant’ as and in another scenario as ’, considering English to Chinese language pair.
  • It gets really tough and problematic when it comes to the translation of organizations and companies’ names. 
  • Also, the content involved in advertising and marketing translation services gets complicated in neural machine translation. As it contains promotional campaigns, including images, videos, and texts. The alignment of the text also gets tough.

It is interesting to note and also quite relieving as well that no matter how much machine translation progresses and gets an indispensable part of translation management but it still requires human translators to edit, review and proofread the content between languages. 

According to experts, human translators can never get obsolete or out of trend as their role in the accuracy of translation and context of the content is irreplaceable.

Final words

Artificial intelligence is playing a vital role in our daily lives and other advancements. Neural machine translation is another process in translation management systems. However, it is quite technical and conceptual. It deals with numerical values and also covers almost every other language.

It works on a mathematical formula and is quite complex. Moreover, like all other software neural machine translation also has its pros and cons. One of the biggest disadvantages is inconsistency in the translation.