Could it really be? A Breakthrough after decades of research in machine translation? Microsoft have recently stated that their machine translation research team has reached ‘human translation quality’. This leads to the question: Will translators soon be replaced by machines? This article will shed light on the future role of human translators and linguists in the era of artificial intelligence (AI) and neural machine translation (NMT).
At their San Francisco launch event on October 4, Google introduced the Pixel Buds. They are two earbuds connected to each other by a wire and designed to be the competitor for Apple’s AirPods. Although the two devices have the same price and same battery life, Pixel buds are able to translate 40 languages in near real time. And since the demonstration, they have taken over the internet.
Three years ago, neural network-based translation appeared to give better results than anything researchers developed within the last twenty years. The sentences sound a lot more natural compared with previous translation methods.
The year 2017 looks promising for the translation and localization industries. The recent advances in Neural Machine Translation (NMT) have been a popular topic over the past year.
