Autotranslation good enough for everyday conversations? http://bit.ly/9cb0VT
Nothing specifically about production and postproduction other than translation has been one of those “difficult” things for computers to get right – like assisted editing! 🙂 Ă‚Â Apply the right algorithms and enough example data (Google’s big advantage) and it can improve.
I do like the idea of language no longer being a barrier to communication.
How have the machines become so adept? Mostly by using new “statistical” techniques. Instead of trying to teach a program the rules of language, computer scientists locate massive corpora of online documents previously translated by humans — say, UN proceedings, which are routinely available in six different languages, or bilingual newspapers. Then they train cloud computers to recognize which words and phrases match up across tongues.
That’s why Google is leading the pack: It’s best at finding oodles of documents to train its cloud. This method also means that the more the Web grows, the better our multilingual machines will get.
Also takes away the need for a world language, if translation is good enough.