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speech-to-speech translation, the ultimate goal of machine translation – and memorably foreshadowed by the ‘Babel fish’ of Douglas Adams (1995): ‘If you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language.’ Initially text-to-text based, Google Translate has more recently been experimenting with a ‘conversation mode’, i.e. In a book published on the first day of the new millennium, futurist Ray Kurzweil (2000) predicted that the spoken translation would be common for 2019 and that computers would reach human translation levels by 2029. Here for example is the first paragraph of this blog translated into Spanish and then back again:Įn un libro publicado el primer día del nuevo milenio, el futurólogo Ray Kurzweil (2000) predijo que la traducción hablada sería común para el año 2019 y que las computadoras llegarían a niveles humanos de traducción para 2029. Google Translate, for example, was launched in 2006, and now supports over 100 languages, although, since it draws on an enormous corpus of already translated texts, it is more reliable with ‘big’ languages, such as English, Spanish, and French.Ī fair amount of scorn has been heaped on Google Translate but, in the languages I mostly deal with, I have always found it fairly accurate.
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In a book published on the first day of the new millennium, futurologist Ray Kurzweil (2000) predicted that spoken language translation would be common by the year 2019 and that computers would reach human levels of translation by 2029.