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It is baffling that machine translation on human language is approaching human accuracy but it is still far behind on programming language, given that it is supposed to be more closed/matching to metal/machine.

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I find that the opposite of baffling: human language is information sparse and redundant; computer languages are information dense and, by choice, are made as unredundant as possible. It just seems like trying to hit a big fluffy cloud on one side and a bald tree on the other. Obviously the big fluffy thing is easier than the spindly, narrow one.

How does machine translation do at poetry, in the sense of capturing the figurative meaning and stylistic elements, not just the literal meaning of the tokens?

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