The distinction between rule-based and statistically-based translation may well be artificial and obscure what is really the interesting distinction in machine translation modules. The latter may well lie in the fact that some methods capture (at least partially) the semantics of a text, and are for example able to enumerate lemmas in the text, change the person of verbs or the gender of nouns, etc. In contrast, other translation methods do not capture the semantics of the text and only perform the translation. At least this type of classification seems to be relevant to artificial intelligence.
