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Not quite sure what this question means, but it sounds an awful lot like the "halting problem". In order to translate one language to another, the 2nd program has to "know" everything there is to know about the first language. But language by its very nature may generate an infinite set of syntactically correct statements from a limited set of lexical symbols: in other words, each language can form an infinite set of words, sentences, etc., and for another language to translate all that, it would have to be able not only to generate the same infinite stuff, but ALSO be able to confirm or prove that it had finished doing so.

This problem is known to be unsolveable, and in other contexts is shown to be equivalent to Godel's Incompleteness Theorem.

Hope this helps!

2007-01-24 17:44:36 · answer #1 · answered by Don M 7 · 0 0

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