What Is Neural Machine Translation and How Does It Work?

Translation has always been a time consuming and resource intensive process that requires a lot of human effort and brain power. But with the advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) a new approach called neural machine translation (NMT) has emerged to address these challenges.

In this article we will dive into the mechanics of neural machine translation, explain how it works and compare it to traditional translation methods including Google Translate. We will also look at some real world applications where NMT has proven to be a game changer.

Pro tip: Use neural machine translation with a translation management system like Centus to translate your content easily.

What is Neural Machine Translation (NMT)?

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) is a new approach to language translation that uses artificial intelligence, specifically deep learning to analyze and translate text.

Unlike its predecessors which used rule based or statistical methods, NMT uses complex neural networks modeled after the human brain to understand and interpret language. This approach allows NMT to produce translations that are not only accurate but also very fluent and contextually correct, often beating human translators.

How Does Neural Machine Translation Work?

NMT translates text based on the context and overall meaning of sentences. It uses large neural network models trained on huge datasets of bilingual text. These models learn to predict the probability of a sequence of words in one language to a sequence in another and produce more natural and fluent translations.

NMT has improved the quality and speed of machine translation by capturing nuances and idioms better.

The core of NMT is its neural network architecture which is an encoder-decoder framework.

• The encoder takes in the sentence in the source language and converts it into a fixed length vector form called sentence embedding. This embedding captures the meaning of the source sentence.
• The decoder uses the encoder’s phrase embedding to generate the translation in the target language. The decoder is trained to produce the best translation by making word by word predictions based on the words it has generated.

Benefits of using Neural Machine Translation

Using neural machine translation has many advantages over human brain and traditional translation methods that’s why it’s the go-to for many translation tasks.

Better translation quality

A neural translation model can capture complex linguistic contexts and patterns because of its deep neural network architecture. As a result, grammatical errors are rare and translations sound more natural.

The fluency and coherence of NMT models improve as they learn the relationships between languages through training on huge parallel corpora.

Contextual awareness

NMT models are good at capturing context and determining the meaning of a statement. These models can use its neural network architecture and attention mechanism to produce contextually relevant translations that considers the entire source sentence.

Multi-language support

Neural machine translation is a versatile, scalable and adaptable solution for multilingual translation workloads.

Human translators and other traditional translation systems rely on language specific rules so they are less adaptable when translating across multiple language pairs. NMT models can be trained in a single unified framework that can support many language pairs.

Neural Machine Translation use cases

Neural machine translation systems have performed amazingly well in many domains by harnessing the power of neural networks. Here are some of the use cases of neural machine translation:

Cross-border communication and global businesses

Effective communication across language barriers is key to successful collaboration, negotiation and expansion. Neural machine translation provides real-time translation services so cross border communication is seamless.

Companies can use neural machine translation technology to communicate with international partners, reach a larger audience and overcome language barriers and hence global growth and opportunity.

Localization of software, websites, and multimedia content

When companies enter new markets they need to adapt their software, website and multimedia content to the local languages and cultures of the new markets.

NMT is a powerful localization solution to ensure the translated text conveys the intended message and captures the cultural references specific to the target audience.

NMT automates the translation process hence streamlines the localization workflow, saves time and money and maintains consistency and quality.

Enhancing language learning and research

NMT systems allow language learners to access translated resources, practice conversations and get instant feedback on their language skills.

Neural machine translation technology also helps researchers to analyze and extract data from multilingual sources so they can discover cross-lingual knowledge and facilitate cross-linguistic collaboration.

Pro tip: To manage a large translation project, use NMT along with a professional localization suite like Centus.