Has Google created its own language?
Will this lead to the end of human translations?
The Neural Machine Translation or simply ‘NMT’ is the name of the latest technology that Google has employed to help improve their real time translation services. Originally showcased earlier this year in September, Google announced that these neural networks are going to be the process behind Google Translate. Google has already started utilising NMT for some languages within the last month.
Traditionally Google Translate has always been a useful tool if you ever needed to know anything from a word to a phrase in another language and was perfect if you required a fast translation as it is instant. But Google Translates’ translations for anything more would mostly be grammatically wrong and lacked a ‘native feel’ (don’t even think about translating slang words). But now with these improvements in technology Google aims to have more accurate translations as well as the NMT being able to learn more with what Google are calling “zero-shot” translations which could be bad news for the professional translation agency of tomorrow.
The zero shot translation is essentially a translation system that has the ability to translate one language to another without previous experience of translating that language pair beforehand. So for example if the NMT had been taught to translate English into Hebrew and vice versa as well as being taught English to Romanian translations and vice versa; now imagine you were in need of Hebrew translation services from the Romanian language the Neural Machine Translation system would be able to translate without having learnt that language pair before.
So for this to happen there must have been some kind of ‘learning’ process involved from Googles artificial intelligence (AI) which begs the question ‘Has Google created its own language?’ that’s the hypothetical thought Devin Coldewey offered when he wrote an article in which he discussed Google’s NMT and its ability to understand a language pair it hasn’t faced before through connections made from prior knowledge.
In fact he is partially correct with these assumptions as AI researchers have suggested that the zero-shot translation might have been a result of Googles NMT being able to communicate with itself potentially bringing the translation level up to exert level.
This all sounds impressive but in the longer run could this ‘Interlingua’ that this AI possesses be the foundations for something more sinister? We tried to warn you before in our previous posts. But in all seriousness it is the forward step in making language translations easier to obtain.
What are your thoughts?
Image by: Kathryn Decker
