How to Speak a Language without Knowing It

[alphadl]

• ACL 2014
• PDF link: https://aclanthology.info/papers/P14-2046/p14-2046
• MT, this paper develops a system that lets people overcome language barriers by letting them speak a language they do not know. That system accepts text entered by a user, translates the text, then converts the translation into a phonetic spelling in the user’s own orthography.
• For example: input:"interesting"-->output:"因吹斯听"

[minicheshire]

I find that this paper is more likely to be about machine transliteration instead of machine translation. In fact I was skimming through the TACL18 when I find the paper Leveraging Orthographic Similarity for Multilingual Neural Transliteration. According to the definition, a translation tells you the meaning of words in another language; a transliteration doesn't tell you the meaning of the words, but it helps you pronounce them (see https://www.familytreemagazine.com/premium/now-what-translation-vs-transliteration/). It's the first time that I came to know this fascinating topic :P