Melville House Books

“Automatic-translation software has long been treated as a joke because of how hilariously it mangles phrases,” notes Clive Thompson. “But in the past few years, something has shifted: The technology is now surprisingly mature.” In a story from the new issue of Wired Magazine, Thompson considers “How have the machines become so adept?”

According to Thompson,

Mostly by using new ‘statistical’ techniques. Instead of trying to teach a program the rules of language, computer scientists locate massive corpora of online documents previously translated by humans — say, UN proceedings, which are routinely available in six different languages, or bilingual newspapers. Then they train cloud computers to recognize which words and phrases match up across tongues.

That’s why Google is leading the pack: It’s best at finding oodles of documents to train its cloud. This method also means that the more the Web grows, the better our multilingual machines will get.

This has some amazing possible ramifications: “For years, pundits have wondered which language will eventually dominate. Will English remain the lingua franca? Will Mandarin ascend? But maybe it’s no longer a competition. Machine translation could be good enough to obviate the need for a primary global language … Some academics predict that auto-translation could even save minor languages from extinction.”

On the other hand, it’s not exactly perfected. “Certainly, any activity requiring serious precision — legal proceedings, business discussions, diplomatic negotiations — will still need expert human translators.”

And for all you translators out there getting steamed, relax. As one expert tells Thompson, “Machine translation isn’t good enough to translate a book.”

Yet.

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.