Morphology and syntax in machine translation pose several challenges, such as complex morphological systems, word order and syntax variability, and contextual morphology. ...
Morphology and syntax in machine translation pose several challenges, such as complex morphological systems, word order and syntax variability, and contextual morphology. The first one is the Complex Morphological System. Indeed, some languages, such as Finnish, Turkish, or Arabic, have rich inflectional systems, where word forms vary based on tense, case, gender, number, etc. Handling these variations in machine translation (MT) is difficult because they require accurate recognition and generation of the correct morphological form. In addition, languages like Hungarian or Korean are agglutinative, meaning multiple morphemes (smallest meaning units) are combined to form long words with complex meanings. Splitting and interpreting these compounds correctly is a major challenge for translation systems. The next thing is Word Order and Syntax Variability. Some languages (e.g., Russian, Latin) have relatively free word order, which makes it challenging for machine translation systems to correctly interpret sentence structure. Without a proper understanding of syntax, MT can struggle with subject-object-verb relations, leading to incorrect translations. Moreover, sentence structures may differ greatly between languages. For example, English follows a Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) pattern, while Japanese is Subject-Object-Verb (SOV). Aligning these syntactic differences can result in mistranslations or loss of meaning. The last one is contextual morphology. In languages like French or Spanish, nouns, adjectives, and verbs must agree in gender and number, both within the same clause and across sentences. Machine translation often struggles with maintaining this agreement, particularly when the translation spans long or complex sentences. Some word forms in morphologically rich languages can be ambiguous without context. For example, in Russian, the word "писать" (to write) changes its form depending on tense and case, but the same form might have multiple interpretations, making it harder to translate correctly. In conclusion, scientists should take measures to address these challenges in the future in this digital age.