Google Brings Offline Neural Machine Translations For 59 Languages To Its Translate App (techcrunch.com)

Google is rolling out offline Neural Machine Translation (NMT) support for 59 languages in the Translate apps. Some of the supported languages include Arabic, Chinese, English, German, Japanese, Spanish, French, and Korean (TechCrunch has a full list of the languages in their report). From the report: In the past, running these deep learning models on a mobile device wasn't really an option since mobile phones didn't have the right hardware to efficiently run them. Now, thanks to both advances in hardware and software, that's less of an issue and Google, Microsoft and others have also found ways to compress these models to a manageable size. In Google's case, that's about 30 to 40 megabytes per language. Users will see the updated offline translations within the next few weeks.

Comments

Re:pivot language?

[AmiMoJo]

I don't have that detail but I can tell you my experience as a user of machine translation for 15+ years.

Originally it only really worked on formal documents, and even then only produced something you could barely understand. The biggest issue seemed to be that it didn't understand context at all.

Google made some early improvements in making the translated text sound more natural. They also managed to fix a lot of common phrases that didn't quite fit the standard grammar model and thus didn't used to get translated properly. Apparently they did that by using the web as a resource for natural language and by allowing users to submit corrections.

Then AI started to be used. Baidu were the first I think and their Chinese/English translation was a huge improvement over everything else. It seemed to work slightly better going from English to Chinese though, and when Google released their AI updates not long after Chinese to English became nearly perfect.

It's actually incredible how good it is now. Often the resulting translation is not only accurate and seemingly context aware, it sounds like something a person might actually say. You don't have to think about what you are writing either. Before you had to be careful to phrase things so that the software could understand it, but not any more.

There are still some issues, like the way Japanese newspaper headlines often get translated as if it was a person speaking about their own experience (e.g. some houses were flooded, but the translation is "my house was flooded" because the software assumes that context), but for conversations between two people it's like Star Trek or something.