
Google’s New Service Translates Languages Almost as Well as Humans Can - jonbaer
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602480/googles-new-service-translates-languages-almost-as-well-as-humans-can/
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hrgeek
Almost as good as human translators at getting the basic meaning right and
putting words in the right order, for similar language pairs, translating
wikipedia articles. The skill of human translators isn't based on getting the
information right, that's a given. The difference between a good and a bad
translator is how well they capture the thoughts and intent of the speaker,
whether they can make their audience feel the same way as the original did. I
say it every time one of these articles comes up, a machine capable of
universal translation will be none other than a true AI.

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xkcd-sucks
Is there an intermediate representation or is it a big matrix of pairwise
language translations? If it's the former we could just start speaking that

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vintermann
No intermediate representation, which is puzzling to me. There's so much
shared structure between languages, especially things like closely related
European languages. You get none of that with this approach.

Either way the intermediate representation would probably be a vector, so not
very practical for human use.

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johnfjacobi
> Google researcher Quoc Le says Google’s big translation upgrade could also
> lead to improved relations between people and machines.

Why does he think this?

