Google’s translation services

In a previous post we brought you the news that human translations trumped machine and artificial intelligence (AI) assisted translations in the translation showdown to end all showdowns, hosted in Korea a couple weeks back. And with all the talk about the ever increasing technological sophistication of AI assisted translations and machine translations and the countless topics of discussions of what effect it will have on translation services and the industry as whole as we know it.

Many have envisioned a future where computers completely replace real human translators, leaving human translators obsolete with only the major professional translation agencies seeing a positive financial translation, others have claimed that machine translations will never be able to match the level of human translators due to the complexities and feeling for the languages that a machine just would not be able to create. Whilst some imagining that rather than humans and computers  competing, there is a thought that maybe machine translators can be used by human translators to make their jobs easier as they have for a number of years now.

One thing is for sure, whatever argument you agree with, machine and AI assisted translations do exist and will be getting better. The majority of the opinion is that machine translations are nothing but basic translations with many grammatical errors, whilst good for one or two lines to get a basic understanding, but when a paragraph is put into a machine translation software, all hell breaks loose.

In a story originally reported by long running Israeli newspaper Haaretz, in a reaction to Google’s announcement that as part of the language list that their Google’s neural machine translators (NMT) already worked within, they were adding Arabic and Hebrew to the list; two much more testing languages to translate. So Haaretz decided to test just how good Google’s NMT Arabic and Hebrew translation services were using a passage of a Hebrew written article to be translated into English. The results? Not so good. They commented on the fact that the overall translation was “adequate” with some sentences being acceptable whilst others lost meaning altogether.

You can read the whole story here:  http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.781219