Machine translation is almost a solved problem

Vasco Pedro had always believed that, despite the rise of artificial intelligence, getting machines to translate languages as well as professional translators do would always need a human in the loop. “Humans are done in translation.” Mr Pedro estimates that human labour currently accounts for around 95% of the global translation industry. In Unbabel’s test, human and machine translators were asked to translate everything from casual text messages to dense legal contracts and the archaic English of an old translation of “Meditations” by Marcus Aurelius. The problem of translating one sentence to another is “pretty close to solved” for those “high-resource” languages with the most training data, says Isaac Caswell, a research scientist at Google Translate. A transparent translation would leave an idiomatic phrase as it is, letting English speakers hear a Pole dismiss a problem as “not my circus, not my monkeys”; a faithful one may even go so far as to change whole cultural references, so that Americans aren’t taken off-guard by “football-shaped” being used to describe a spherical object.