In a meeting at Google in 2004, the discussion turned to an e-mail message the company had received from a fan in South Korea. Sergey Brin, a Google founder, ran the message through an automatic ...

Imagine it’s the 1950s and you’re in charge of one of the world’s first electronic computers. A company approaches you and says: “We have 10 million words of French text that we’d like to translate ...

Ask most computer programmers what would happen if, suddenly, their computers got a thousand times faster. Most would rhapsodize about being able to immediately put that extra power to good use. Ask ...

In the 23rd century, people will use a gizmo that looks suspiciously like a flashlight to communicate with alien species. That’s in the world of “Star Trek.” In the here and now, a small Marina del ...

One of the most frequently-used phrases at (virtual) business conferences these days is “the future of work.” It’s increasingly clear that artificial intelligence and other new technologies will bring ...

The Internet is an American invention, and though it has spread around the world, the bulk of the communication conducted through it is still in English. Even so, depending on what you're doing, you ...

IN “STAR TREK” it was a hand-held Universal Translator; in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” it was the Babel Fish popped conveniently into the ear. In science fiction, the meeting of distant ...

Kurzweil shares his thoughts on the future of language technology. We live in a world where language technologies, still in their infancy, are powerful enough to turn your web browser into a text ...

The European Commission has made freely available its collection of about 1 million sentences, and their high quality translations, in 22 of the 23 official EU languages -- including those of the new ...

KYOTO, Japan — Toshiyuki Takezawa sat down at a bank of powerful computers here recently and spoke into a microphone. “Moshimoshi,” he said. Instantly, the computers whirred to life, furiously ...