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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The potential usefulness of automatic computerized translation was recognized by the very first AI researchers in the 1950s. But it wasn’t until new algorithms emerged in the 1980s and 1990s that the ...

THOSE passingly familiar with machine translation (MT) may well have reacted in the following ways at some point. “Great!” would be one such, on plugging something into the best-known public and free ...

I work at a large international organization translating speeches from French, Spanish, and Russian. When a rumor began spreading in my office that our jobs were to be “supplemented” by computer ...

Three years of work by a large interdisciplinary team at the University of Southern California has created a rudimentary but working two-way voice translation system. Three years of work by a large ...

Companies that once focused almost exclusively on preparing software and other high-tech products for export are entering some new markets of their own. Amid the tech slowdown of the past few years, ...