In a meeting at Google in 2004, the discussion turned to an e-mail message the company had received from a fan in South Korea. Sergey Brin, a Google founder, ran the message through an automatic ...

THOSE passingly familiar with machine translation (MT) may well have reacted in the following ways at some point. “Great!” would be one such, on plugging something into the best-known public and free ...

Imagine it’s the 1950s and you’re in charge of one of the world’s first electronic computers. A company approaches you and says: “We have 10 million words of French text that we’d like to translate ...

Promotional literature for computer-based language translation programs promises quick and comprehensible translations between English, Spanish, French, German, and Italian. Native and near native ...

IN “STAR TREK” it was a hand-held Universal Translator; in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” it was the Babel Fish popped conveniently into the ear. In science fiction, the meeting of distant ...

People expect translations to happen at the speed and accuracy of a Star Trek Universal Translator. Unfortunately, that time is not here yet, but we are approaching it quickly. The acquisition of ...

In the 23rd century, people will use a gizmo that looks suspiciously like a flashlight to communicate with alien species. That’s in the world of “Star Trek.” In the here and now, a small Marina del ...

The Internet is an American invention, and though it has spread around the world, the bulk of the communication conducted through it is still in English. Even so, depending on what you're doing, you ...

I work at a large international organization translating speeches from French, Spanish, and Russian. When a rumor began spreading in my office that our jobs were to be “supplemented” by computer ...

The makers of a University of Southern California computer translation system consistently rated among the world's best are teaching their software something new: English grammar. The makers of a ...

Agentic AI tools can translate more than just words — they can also incorporate video and audio sources to further refine and add context to their actions and results. Generative AI (genAI) agents are ...