Source | Language Spring and Autumn
Current machine translation technology can be divided into two categories: one is Rich Resource NMT, which refers to language pairs with abundant bilingual corpora (such as Chinese – English); the other is Low Resource NMT, which lacks sufficient bilingual corpora (such as Chinese – Hebrew).
Current machine translation has performed very well on Rich Resource, and even under certain training sets, it has reached or exceeded the level of human translation. However, Low Resource has just begun, and there are many interesting studies, with the overall level still at a relatively primitive stage. — Zhou Ming, Vice President of Microsoft Research Asia
According to the research findings of historical comparative linguistics, it is generally believed that the languages of the world can be divided into a dozen or twenty language families based on their kinship, among which the more well-known ones are Indo-European Family, Sino-Tibetan Family, Uralic Family, Altaic Family, Semitic-Hamitic Family, Caucasian Family, Dravidian Family, Austronesian Family (also known as the Malay-Polynesian family), South Asian Family, etc.
Historical linguistics classifies all languages that come from a common ancestral mother tongue into the same language family, and under language families, there are further divisions into language groups, branches, languages, dialects, and sub-dialects, with language groups further subdivided into subgroups.
The Indo-European family is the largest language family in the world and is also the most widely studied. The Indo-European family includes many of the most important languages in the world, such as English, Spanish, French, German, Russian, etc. These languages are the official languages of many countries and organizations and play an extremely important role in global business, science, academia, communication, and international conferences. The speakers of the aforementioned languages account for more than half of the world’s total population. The Indo-European family also includes widely spoken languages such as Portuguese, Hindi, Bengali, etc. Some classical languages in the fields of religion, culture, and philosophy are also included in the Indo-European family, such as Latin, Greek, Persian, Sanskrit, Pali, etc.
Languages in the Indo-European family have inflectional characteristics (verbs and nouns change endings based on their roles in sentences). Some languages (like English) have lost many inflectional changes during their evolution and have become relatively simple.
The distribution of the Indo-European family extends from the Americas, through Europe, to the northern Indian subcontinent. It is generally believed that Proto-Indo-European originated in the forested regions north of the Black Sea during the Neolithic period (around 7000 BC). The original inhabitants of the European continent began migrating between 3500 and 2500 BC, moving west to the westernmost part of Europe, south to the Mediterranean, north to Scandinavia, and east to India.
The Celtic group is a relatively small group within the Indo-European family. Celtic languages were once widely distributed across Europe, but due to conquests by the Romans and Germans and large-scale migrations, speakers of Celtic languages were driven to Wales, Ireland, Scotland, and other areas. The main languages included in the Celtic group are Welsh, Irish Gaelic, and Scottish Gaelic, as well as some extinct languages such as Cornish, Gaulish, and Manx. One branch of the Celts migrated back to France, and their language is called Breton. Welsh adopts a