# What is Machine Translation? Definition & Technical Mechanics

> **Source:** [SPIDITS AI AI Glossary](https://spidits.com/ai-glossary)  
> **Category:** Natural Language Processing  
> **Canonical Citation:** [https://spidits.com/ai-glossary/machine-translation](https://spidits.com/ai-glossary/machine-translation)

## Definition
Machine Translation (MT) is a subfield of computational linguistics focused on using artificial intelligence models to automatically translate text or speech from one human language to another.

## Architectural Mechanics & Deep Dive
Machine translation is the automated process of translating text or speech from one natural language to another using computer systems. It evolved from rule-based and phrase-based models to neural machine translation (NMT), which uses deep neural networks (and now Transformers) to capture syntax and context, delivering highly fluent translations.

## Industry Applications & Real-World Use Cases
Global localization APIs, conversational translation tools, and document translating.

## Frequently Asked Questions

### What is Neural Machine Translation (NMT)?
An approach that uses deep neural networks (originally sequence-to-sequence LSTMs, now Transformers) to translate whole sentences contextually.

### What is BLEU score?
Bilingual Evaluation Understudy is an algorithm scoring metric comparing machine translations with professional human reference translations.

## Related Terminology
- [nlp](https://spidits.com/ai-glossary/nlp)
- [transformer](https://spidits.com/ai-glossary/transformer)
- [attention-mechanism](https://spidits.com/ai-glossary/attention-mechanism)

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*From the SPIDITS AI Knowledge Base (336+ terms indexed). Explore full technical definitions: [https://spidits.com/ai-glossary](https://spidits.com/ai-glossary)*