The metamorphosis of machine translation: The rise of neural machine translation and its challenges

Abstract

Machine translation refers to the process of using computers to translate source language into target language, which has undergone significant transformations since its inception, with the current mainstream neural machine translation achieving satisfactory translation performance. This paper overviews the three developmental stages of machine translation: rule-based machine translation, statistical machine translation, and neural machine translation, with a focus on neural machine translation. It introduces the key models that emerged in the development process of neural machine translation, namely the recurrent neural network encoder-decoder model, recurrent neural network search model, and Transformer, and compares their strengths and limitations. Other relevant technologies and models developed alongside neural machine translation are also discussed. Addressing the current challenges of neural machine translation, the paper delves into issues of overfitting, low-resource translation, structural optimization of Transformer models, and enhancement of neural machine translation interpretability. Finally, the paper explores the prospects of applying neural machine translation to multimodal translation.