Still off topic: Well, this is partly lexicological knowledge and research on translation. Each language pair and translation direction has its peculiar problems. Whether or not you are able to say it is "pure speculation" depends on how familiar you are with computer linguistics, and its progress in determining semantic content from texts (step 1) and rephrasing it in a given target language (step 2). I'm glad that you accept that it is about the pair and the direction of the translation. Robert
It is not a language in general that is difficult, but the pair a language is in: the pair English-Russian is, in some aspects, more difficult than the other way around because of the choice for the perfective aspect or imperfective aspect of the tenses. An English text does not offer any clues as to which aspect to choose, but anyone who wants to speaks Russian has to decide instantly. A program is unlikely do that.
I'm sorry, but that's pure speculation. It would be interesting to see research about machine translation for some particular language pairs, though.
Arthur ___________________________________________________________________________________ If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki!
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