Transfer-based machine translation

In contrast to the simpler direct model of MT, transfer MT breaks translation into three steps: analysis of the source language text to determine its grammatical structure, transfer of the resulting structure to a structure suitable for generating text in the target language, and finally generation of this text.

Transfer-based MT systems are thus capable of using knowledge of the source and target languages.

The way in which transfer-based machine translation systems work varies substantially, but in general they follow the same pattern: they apply sets of linguistic rules which are defined as correspondences between the structure of the source language and that of the target language.

The first stage involves analysing the input text for morphology and syntax (and sometimes semantics) to create an internal representation.

This representation can then be refined to a more abstract level putting emphasis on the parts relevant for translation and ignoring other types of information.