

Ask HN: State of the art of machine translation? - tjr

What are the best things currently out there?
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luxpir
Google Translate for certain language pairs. It's still struggling in others.
Even in the pairs it's passable at, regional language variations are a long
way off, as are most original expressions, idioms and any form of
localization.

It started in the 1950s, and in the last 30 years it has certainly come of
age, but it seems like it needs a new level of semantic and contextual linking
from this point on, where the multitude of options for each phrase or word can
be statistically compared in the context of the whole piece and it's own
contextual relationships.

This could take another 30 years, or a breakthrough could bring that forward
to 5-10 years. Predicting the future is of course a fool's game, but given the
ever increasing mass of data being exposed to companies such as Google, it's
not wholly unforeseeable.

It will be interesting to see if Machine Copywriting or Machine Design start
to develop in the coming years, and to consider how inhuman and inconsiderate
of the reader/viewer those might be.

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jnbiche
Google Translate. No other general MT comes close (there are specialized MT
systems that can surpass it). It's a result of Google's possession of so many
terabytes of bilingual corpora (and a very clever hybrid system).

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toomuchcoffee
And yet, it leaves so much to be desired.

