Understand translation concepts
One of the many challenges of translation between languages is that words don't have a one to one replacement between languages. Machine translation advancements are needed to improve the communication of meaning and tone between languages.
Literal and semantic translation
Early attempts at machine translation applied literal translations. A literal translation is where each word is translated to the corresponding word in the target language. This approach presents some issues. For one case, there may not be an equivalent word in the target language. Another case is where literal translation can change the meaning of the phrase or not get the context correct.
Artificial intelligence systems must be able to understand, not only the words, but also the semantic context in which they're used. In this way, the service can return a more accurate translation of the input phrase or phrases. The grammar rules, formal versus informal, and colloquialisms all need to be considered.
Text and speech translation
Text translation can be used to translate documents from one language to another, translate email communications that come from foreign governments, and even provide the ability to translate web pages on the Internet. Many times you see a Translate option for posts on social media sites, or the Bing search engine can offer to translate entire web pages that are returned in search results.
Speech translation is used to translate between spoken languages, sometimes directly (speech-to-speech translation) and sometimes by translating to an intermediary text format (speech-to-text translation).