Auto translation is working better
07/01/10 11:10 Filed in: miscellany
Automatic-translation software has long been treated as a joke because of how hilariously it mangles phrases. (After one Czech member described her collection of pythons, another poster chimed in seamlessly to admit, “I am so afraid by snakes.”) But in the past few years, something has shifted: The technology is now surprisingly mature. I discovered this in the spring when I had to read Web material written inFinnish, German, Spanish, and even Korean. I used Google’s Chrome browser, and it automatically reworked every foreign page into shockingly understandable English.
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.
Clive Thompson has more here at wired....