Has perfect Machine Translation arrived?

This week Google made a big announcement for those of us who work in machine translation (MT). They rolled out a new translation engine for their Chinese > English machine translation service using artificial intelligence. According to Google, this new technology "scores nearly identical to human translators". Usually when MT developers say "scores" they are referring to BLEU metric scores which is a controversial but standard way of measuring MT quality. But in this case there was no mention of how they "scored" their new translations.

Artificial intelligence is still in its infancy, when you start getting targeted robo calls and emails that really sound like they are from a person then you'll know that AI has matured into a viable technology. For now all they can do is carry on the most rudimentary conversations and it's really easy to make them look dumb. I subscribe to the GrowthBot from HubSpot and it's like speaking to a 5th grader with a very limited education and vocabulary. It's still got a lot of growing up to do. But make no mistake AI companies are the next unicorns. Billions will be spend on AI over the next decade.

At Pairaphrase we deliver MT solutions using the latest MT technologies which we bundle into viable business solutions that make translating content safe, easy, less expensive and faster, All our clients want perfect machine translation, right now that's just not possible. Will artificial intelligence make that a reality? Well I think it will help us get there but I also think that some text will always require human help to translate accurately. Just like human translators, MT engines struggle as the source text gets more complex and technical.

We've been testing the new Google Translate Chinese > English engine and there's no doubt that the translation quality is better. Is it perfect or on par with a human translator? Sorry not in all cases, but the translations do require less editing to make them the equivalent of human quality. We're looking forward to our MT partner Microsoft's response and for more advancements in artificial intelligence powered MT. Until then, remember we were able to put a man on the moon, put a rover on Mars and fly to Jupiter before we could develop a machine to translate from one language to another. That's how hard translation really is.

Rick Woyde is a longtime entrepreneur, inventor of Pairaphrase, the Managing Director of Language Arts & Science and a dedicated volunteer. Rick can be reached at [email protected].