Computers can’t read. So how do they translate?

Video transcript

Computers can't read, right? They only do math. So how can one translate English into French?

Exactly, they only handle numbers. So step one is turning each word into numbers. The word hello becomes a list of numbers.

Then the model does math on those numbers, and finally turns the resulting numbers back into a word, like bonjour.

So translation is just words to numbers, math, then numbers back to words?

Yes, that's the whole goal of the paper. Next, we'll see how words get chopped into small pieces first.