Research procedures in machine translation

translation The symbolic nature of language is probably responsible for the widely held but erroneous view that linguistics is a branch of mathematics: a string of symbols “looks like” a mathematical formula. And, of course, a high school language textbook, with its rules, looks rather like a mathematical handbook. Mathematicians are forced to adhere to the rules of mathematical systems by the high cost of mistakes (i.e., of variations from the rules). Most speakers of most natural languages never learn the textbook rules, and those who do learn them discover soon enough that the cost of breaking many of the stated rules is negligible. In fact, whereas mathematical systems are defined by their axioms, their explicit and standard rules, natural languages are defined by the habits of their speakers, and the so-called rules are at best reports of those habits and at