Difficulties for Machine Translation Systems

2.4.2 Compound Nouns
For machine translation systems it is also difficult to deal with compounds, two or more words which function as one word, e.g. fireplace. In English the words are separated by a hyphen (video-tape) or whitespace (door handle). In German for example, machine translation systems often miss a clear separator between the set of words because they are not separated. How can the system be expected to know whether the German compound "Beinhaltung" has to be translated into English as containing (Be-Inhaltung) or as leg pose (Bein-Haltung). The decision between two translations in this case is even for Example-Based Systems with dictionaries including compound vocabulary items difficult.