Google still has a very long way doing an adequate translation between a language such as Chinese and English. I'd be surprised if Google was taking such a pedestrian approach in solving that particular problem.<p>As it stands, languages such as Chinese are intrinsically implicit in nature. In fact, the more adept at the language, the more you can express with less. If you follow the literature back a couple thousand years, the amount expressed in a few characters is absolutely astounding.<p>If you take the example they use at the bottom regarding wonton, it's down right criminal to map the grammar in such a hurried manner. For one, just from the romanization of wonton, the AI should be able to gauge that it's looking for 2 characters and not 1 (1 character per syllable). However, in the case of the menu, the wonton egg drop soup drops a character to save some space.<p>Taking a straight forward CFG approach will never result in an accurate translation. What may work well is to do multi-pass contextual analytic processing in parallel.