{"id":10613,"date":"2020-02-18T13:00:06","date_gmt":"2020-02-18T13:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.1stopasia.com\/?p=10237"},"modified":"2023-11-14T15:36:41","modified_gmt":"2023-11-14T15:36:41","slug":"is-vietnamese-machine-translation-achievable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.1stopasia.com\/blog\/is-vietnamese-machine-translation-achievable\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Vietnamese Machine translation achievable?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Currently, Vietnam is one of the fastest-growing economies<\/a> in the world, which inevitably adds it to the list of top countries in the business sphere, where big companies might want to invest. And wherever we have a growing business interest, translation services start to see growing demand too.<\/p>\n

Nowadays the language barrier is easy to break by using machine translation and even more up-to-date would be to say neural machine translation (NMT). We have seen with various languages from the region as Chinese that sometimes even the most modern algorithms cannot deliver the quality of a near-to-human translation, which poses limitations to using modern technologies for Asian languages translation. We\u2019ve decided to dig a bit deeper and see how this statement reflects the situation with Vietnamese language machine translation. Is it valid or Vietnamese language machine translation is actually achievable?<\/p>\n

Looking back on past researches<\/h2>\n

I haven\u2019t really considered the matter until the topic popped up in my mind recently, so I started from the beginning. It seems there is quite a lot on the matter, when it comes to describing the scientific approaches and how the algorithm works but none simply explained and understandable for people without technical knowledge.<\/p>\n

In general, it is safe to say that achieving some reasonable level of machine translation for Vietnamese-English is not hard to obtain. Most difficulties come when the translation has to be between two Asian languages like Vietnamese-Japanese or Chinese-Vietnamese but that\u2019s another story.<\/p>\n

Recently with the development of NMT there is room for improvement in any kind of machine translation. However, in this article, we aim to look not at the state of the machine translation quality output that any tool will deliver but mostly to outline possible linguistic specifics of Vietnamese language, which may pose a difficulty in reaching a near-to-human quality of the translations.<\/p>\n

Wordcount and why it matters?<\/h2>\n

When we translate from one language to another there are certain specifics like how much words there are in the source language text and how much there will be in the target language when the translation is finalized. This parameter is called wordcount and is well known in the translation industry.<\/p>\n

Translating Vietnamese into English text will tend to shrink with about 40%, while the opposite will be valid for English into Vietnamese translation.<\/p>\n

What does wordcount have to do with NMT?<\/h2>\n

\"VietnameseI was wondering the same when I started reading about that but there is a feature that is easily showcased this way, just follow my train of thoughts here.<\/p>\n

In Vietnamese, there are the so-called compound words, which simply put means that two words written separately in Vietnamese will form one word in English. For example:<\/p>\n

anh em (brother)<\/a><\/p>\n

When it is used as a noun:<\/p>\n