Why does phonetic ambiguity increase when translating between languages with differing grapheme-phoneme correspondence using a statistical machine translation system?

💡 Explanation

Phonetic ambiguity increases because phonetic collapse, where multiple graphemes map to the same phoneme in the target language, causes the system to lose phonetic distinctions. Therefore, translation becomes ambiguous, rather than correct grapheme mapping due to character sets, tokenization or alignment failing to map rare words.

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