Machine Translation

I just got an email from Google announcing that it is shutting down its Google Translator Toolkit (GTT) service. This is pretty big news, although I am not really sure why. Was anyone using GTT? Obviously not very many and the number of users was in decline, because otherwise why would they do that? I …

In this famous clip from Goodfellas, the character played by Joe Peschi seems to take offence at Henry’s accusation of him being a funny guy. Normally a gangster like Tommy would have whacked Henry instead of just laughing it off as a big joke. Why did I put this clip in a blog post? Well …

Since it was introduced in 2006, Google Translate has become the leading online machine translation application. It is estimated that over 100 Billion words are translated each day by Google Translate. It translates into and out of over 100 languages. And the most amazing fact of all: it is free! So with such a valuable tool …

This debate has been going on for years. Will machine translation (MT) become good enough to replace human translators? Will professional translators need to find another line of work? If recent history is any proof, the answer is no. MT will not replace professional human translators in our lifetime. This notion is shared by many …