I suppose we should just give up the whole enterprise and not bother trying at all, or what are you saying? Maybe we can't ever solve the "last mile", so what?
I'm saying the current techniques will only take us so far and they break down in hilarious ways when they reach these edge cases.
My point is to reach true parity with human capabilities machine translation needs to reach the point where it can also recognize "I can't translate that" instead of always trying to spit out an answer and returning hilarious garbage in such situations.
Another behavior I would expect to see is sometimes returning multiple possible results. This is common when a translator doesn't know the exact context but can imagine the range of possible contexts in which an utterance can occur and conveys them all in order to get the message across.
Currently I don't see anyone trying to take this approach. It's all simple one string in gives one string out.
My point is to reach true parity with human capabilities machine translation needs to reach the point where it can also recognize "I can't translate that" instead of always trying to spit out an answer and returning hilarious garbage in such situations.
Another behavior I would expect to see is sometimes returning multiple possible results. This is common when a translator doesn't know the exact context but can imagine the range of possible contexts in which an utterance can occur and conveys them all in order to get the message across.
Currently I don't see anyone trying to take this approach. It's all simple one string in gives one string out.