Microsoft Claims Chinese-English Translation Tool Works as Well as a Human

Your days of guessing what you Baidu or Google Translation actually means may be nearly over.

Microsoft claims to have developed a Chinese-English translation tool that actually works.

The American tech firm headed by Bill Gates says it has employed Artificial Intelligence (AI) to translate Chinese text into English and vice-versa with the same quality as a human.

The difference, Microsoft says, is how it trained its AI.

Conventionally, translation tools use statistical machine translation which produce iffy at best results.

However, the new system uses neural networks that closely mimic how a human would approach a translation.

The dual learning process sees the AI reverse the translation once its done to see how well it did.

The repetitive system also sees the work revised repeatedly, similar to how a human would work when editing their writing.

The software can even change the direction of its translation and read from right to left, for example, producing similar results either way.

Not convinced?

You can test it out yourself and give feedback here: https://translator.microsoft.com/neural/.

Let us know what you think.!