Tuesday, October 23, 2007

How Do You Say... - WSJ.com

How Do You Say... - WSJ.com: "Google also has been developing its own translation software, which it uses to translate Web sites written in Chinese and Arabic. Google's technology is different from other translation software. Google feeds massive volumes of existing translations of text into a program, which uses that material to perform new translations by determining the statistical probability that a word or phrase in one language is equivalent to that of the other, says Peter Norvig, Google's director of research. The source text can include matching articles from news sites written in both Chinese and English, or European Union documents that are translated into the languages of the group's member countries, he says. Other translation technologies rely on preprogrammed dictionaries and grammatical rules to perform translations."

That's all the article says about the future... The rest is a look at the past, at technologies that have been invented in the 60's and early 70's of last century.