Last week several MT software tools were tested in an international effort to find the best machine translator of Chinese and Arabic texts. It turned out that Google’s software ran away with the victory in almost all exercises.
The Internet is about to make the world a small place. So long as the network is up, we are never more than a few seconds away from American city blogs, British animal rights campaigns and Chinese teenagers reflections on Morten Harket. But then there was this language then. What shall we do with the teenager’s considerations if they only exist in Chinese?
This is where translation software arrives. There are many services that translate a lot of other languages, but most of them are disappointing. Fortunately, we are working on improvements.
The new program throws the knowledge of vocabulary and grammar overboard, and focuses instead on learning things for themselves, through meticulous comparison of previously translated texts.
And it seems like that this approach works. During this year’s comparison of 40 programs for translation of Chinese and Arabic texts, Google’s solution provides best results for 35 of 36 tasks.
According to experts, this system can start to resemble human translation, if it has access to sufficient texts of a certain type, such as news articles. All the current systems are struggling, however, with informal texts.
Future programs will probably use a combination of techniques to manage the task, writes “Nature”. Meanwhile you may translate at Slogan Translation & Interpreting Agency here.
