10 months, 4 weeks ago

Translation Tech Is Amazing, Except When It’s Not

Today’s language translation apps are like self-driving cars: incredibly useful, promising, nearing maturity, and almost entirely powered by machines. Speaking little to no English, Andre is navigating the American Dream almost entirely through Google Translate, the most popular speech-to-speech translation app, first launched 10 years ago. “Translate is one of the products we built that’s entirely using artificial intelligence,” a Google spokesperson says. “Since launching Google’s Neural Machine in 2016, we’ve seen the largest improvements in accuracy to translate entire sentences rather than just phrases.” At the same time, half of the six apps I tried for this story sometimes botch even basic greetings. For instance, when I asked Siri and Microsoft Translator to convert “Olá, tudo bem?” from Portuguese to English, both correctly replied, “Hi, how are you?” Google Translate and Amazon Alexa, on the other hand, returned a more literal and awkward, “Hi, everything is fine?” or “Hi, is everything OK?” Not a total fail.

Wired
Translation Tech Google Microsoft Translate Andre Google Translate
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