Direct Machine Translation

The simplest machine-translation paradigm: source-language words are translated into target-language words using a bilingual dictionary, with limited or no syntactic analysis and only shallow reordering heuristics. Direct MT is cheap to build and always produces some output, but it cannot handle structural divergence between languages. In sign-language accessibility, a direct English-to-ASL pipeline tends to produce Signed Exact English — a word-for-sign transliteration that matches the syntax of English rather than the grammar of ASL — and so is not a fluent ASL translation.