A very fast, dedicated computer, IBM's Deep Blue, is now the best chess player on the planet. ![]() But improvement is inevitable, and a pattern in artificial intelligence is emerging that may help us see what is going to come.įor many years, AI researchers were trying to solve the "hard" problems of getting a computer to play chess well or prove mathematical theorems, assuming that the "easy" problems of getting a robot to maneuver on its own through the average home's living room were too simple to bother with. "Prediction is difficult," said Neils Bohr, "especially about the future." So what breakthroughs in cognitive science, neural computing, artificial intelligence, and computational linguistics might be around the corner are impossible to say, and whether or not they will result in human-level MT is also impossible to say. Most translators think that MT is impossible, or at least sufficiently difficult that they won't see it within their professional lifetimes. Futurists use the "five year" benchmark frequently, and have since the 1950s been claiming that human-level MT is only "five years away." The most accurate futurist these days, Ray Kurzweill, thinks good MT is about 12 years away. Where will we be in five years? That depends who you ask. And with carefully prepared source texts on certain subjects using highly customized (read expensive) MT systems, the results can be better than word salad, those considerable post-editing by human translators is still essential to produce readable copy acceptable to the general public. If all you need to know is roughly what a document is about, then machine translation can play a role in your work. The word salad is now useful enough so that, at least in some cases, you can get the gist of a document in a matter of seconds. Word salad is the commonly used phrase.īut machine translation is getting better. You can test this yourself by trying to translate this page with Google, Yahoo!, or other services and see what the results are like. Hype from MT companies notwithstanding, the simple reality is that the technology does not do what its proponents claim. First, at present there is no machine translation system that can even begin to approach the quality a mediocre human translator can easily produce. So let's take a step back and see where we are, then we'll look at where we're likely to be in five, ten, and fifteen years. Recent news articles make real machine translation seem as though it's just around the corner, and a recent discussion on the Honsyaku list (a Japanese translators group online) led to strong opinions and heated debate about the future of computers in translation.
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