Question: Is it hard to translate irish?

Sheila Castilho answered on 12 Nov 2018:

Great question! I’d say it is easier for humans than it is for a machine translation system. The reason is because a system will need loads of parallel data, which is texts translated from Irish into English aligned by the sentence level – each sentence in Irish corresponds to its translation in English. However, we do not have that much data for Irish-English. There are a few people now that are trying to gather that type of data to improve machine translation for Irish, so in the future, it will be of much more quality. But for humans, I think it depends how well they speak both languages, how often they use it, how much they read in those languages. For example, because I have been outside Brazil for a long time, sometimes I don’t know the translation for some words I have learned in English! So weird right? =)