Translation

[Robert Lawless]

Today’s USA TODAY carries a story headlined “Military tests portable 
translators” about the effort to build a machine to do real-time 
translation relying on speech recognition software. The story relates, 
“This device has been particularly elusive when it comes to translating 
between English and complex languages such as arabic and Mandarin Chinese.” 
The “chief technical officer for IBM Research” is quoted as saying, “You’re 
talking about (languages) where everything is different – the words, the 
structure, even spelling and punctuation.”

Later in the story we learn that translation “is made more difficult by the 
great variety of spoken dialects and by large structural differences 
between English and arabic and Chinese. Chinese nouns, for instance, have 
no gender. In arabic, which does not use capital letters, many proper names 
are also common nouns or descriptive phrases.”

Huh? What am I missing here?