Recent Innovations in NTT’s Statistical Machine Translation
Masaaki Nagata, Katsuhito Sudoh, Jun Suzuki, Yasuhiro Akiba, Tsutomu Hirao, Hajime Tsukada · NTT technical review · 2013
English and Japanese have very different word orders, and they are probably one of the most difficult language pairs to translate.We developed a new method of translating English to Japanese that takes advantage of the head-final linguistic nature of Japanese.It first changes the word order in an English sentence into that of a Japanese sentence and then translates the reordered English sentence into Japanese.We found that our method dramatically improved the accuracy of English-to-Japanese translation.We also found that the method is highly effective for Chinese-to-Japanese translation.