Unit Granularity

<SymbolicUserInterfaceDiscussion

Unit granularity refers to a comparison of how different schemes may depict similar discrete terms in different numbers, and different orders of units. Essentially, since what constitutes a unit is free to be defined within a language, the alignment between terms is often limited. This is a prime reason why machine translation processes remain imperfect, as its highly difficult to document the varying and often contradictory logic by which compound terms are preffered or reduced to singularities.

Spanish / English:

 hola, que tal? (3)/ hello, how are you? (4)

Chinese / English

 Mei-guo ren = Americ -an
 Zhong-guo ren = Chin -ese person

ie, reductive slang (SymbolicLanguage?)alters the boundaries of the terms, though not necessarily in alignment with other language terms. Preferred terms can realign the distinctions in a way that defines an order of formality, underneath the terms themselves. Also, the "com-pound-s" themselves may be "single words," within one context, so the deliniations between terms arent directly related to characters. The alphabet componental units (with suffixes, prefixes etc) wont directly correspond to symbols that have radically different term contexts.