Google, Systran and more!
Google has decided to harness artificial intelligence and venture into neural machine translation in eight languages, including French, Chinese, Spanish and Japanese into English. Systran is launching PNM (for “Purely Neural MT”), a genuine revolution in the automatic translation market with this “deep learning” project.
The new translation system processes a complete sentence, a paragraph or a document in its entirety which basically means that it tends to replace the translator’s thought process and expertise.
How it works
The aim is to reproduce the workings of the human brain.
The source sentence first needs to be processed to extract the meaning.
The system then focuses on the grammar and meaning of the words in the sentence, which will enhance the understanding of the overall message.
The system then goes on to analyse the context of the message and hones in on keywords.
The engine is informed of the results, which makes it possible to put forward the most suitable translations possible.
It is only a minor advance in improving automatic translation and it will still be difficult to understand, and then translate, unusual words. But it can quickly correct itself, by saving every change the end user makes to the translation, thus gradually reducing any room for error.
Neural machine translation is not intended to replace the unique craft of a good, trained and experienced human translator, who will never mistranslate a proper name, forget a word and can in fact select the correct translation for a unique word or a word with many meanings, is able to adapt the style to the audience and cultures in question as well as find the appropriate idiomatic expression.
In a world where translation is exponential, neural machine translation enables translators to focus on added-value translations, which is in fact comes as good news.
The Chambre Nationale des Entreprises de Traduction (CNET) is organising a round-table discussion on artificial intelligence and translation on 23 June at Marriott Renaissance le Parc in Paris.
Catherine Granell, Director of CG Traduction & Interprétation, re-elected Chairperson for the CNET, and Treasurer for European Union of Associations of Translation Companies (EUATC), is bringing together players, users and academics in charge of these projects so that they may compare points of view.