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

Only works for translating speeches

[Shotgun]

If your blog sounds like a politician giving a speech at the UN, this service will do a wonderful job. Doubtful that it will do any better that Babelfish otherwise.

The biggest problem in artificial intelligence is that the system learns the material that it is trained to, and only that material. Computers don't generalize or extrapolate the known into the unknown worth a damn.

Re:Unsupported assertions

[stevejsmith]

No, it's because Google has tons of talent, money, already-archived text to work with, computers, respect in the industry, and consumer base. I can't think of a company that possesses these characteristics more so than Google.

T.Q.

[moviepig.com]

The system has been trained using the United Nations Documents as a corpus.

Seems one could devise a TQ (tranlsation quotient) measuring the effectiveness of machine (or human) translators. Take any standard reading-comprehension test, a send its text material through the translator, and back ...and then compare the scores of subjects taking the resulting test vs. those taking the original.

(Before such translators make their way into, say, diplomatic circles, I'd sure hope there's some objective demonstration of near-infallibility...)

Re:fascinating

[elrous0]

or at the least pick out pertinent words like "bomb."

Why do I have a funny feeling that this research isn't being funded by philanthropic foundations?

-Eric