"The Google research paper Attention Is All You Need came out of work on machine translation, where researchers were testing how to make English–French or English–German translations better, faster, and easier to train."
The original Transformer paper evaluated English-to-German and English-to-French machine translation, reporting improved translation quality, greater parallelisation, and reduced training costs. These experiments establish the architecture's original research context and its practical advantages over earlier sequence models.
View Source