Coming Soon, The Google Translator

compuglot writes "Google gave journalists a glimpse of its next generation machine translation system at a May 19th Google Factory Tour. "Google Blogoscoped" offers an excellent overview of the presentation. The system has been trained using the United Nations Documents as a corpus. This corpus is some 20 billion words worth of content. It uses existing source and target language translations (done by human translators at the U.N.) to find patterns it then uses to build rules for translating between those languages. Apparently it was successful where the current version had failed in translating certain phrases. If anyone were capable of making a serious go of MT, that would have to be Google."

Comments

Lovely translation source...

[isa-kuruption]

So when you go to translate.google.com and translate something, the result will be legal-eze in the resulting languages.

Spanish: "Que pasa?"
English translation: "With regards to the current situation, how is the day progressing?"

Re:fascinating

[Anonymous Coward]

You go all the way to Iran to get gasoline? Who are you, George W Bush?

Re:fascinating

[should_be_linear]

but the Bible uses many outdated or non-standard phrases and sentence structures, as does most legal text I've ever seen. I'm not a linguist or a statistician, but from my uneducated viewpoint it sounds like problems might arise in the texts that are available for training the system. Anyone know how they're planning to overcome this?

Harry Potter is the answer. It is several "normal language" books and is translated to all major languages. Also, program would finally figure out how to translate words like "Quidditch".