[…] Machine pseudo-translation is not going to change my line of work that much. It is useful for many things, for example for identifying patents that do not need to be translated by a human. But its capabilities seem to have reached yet another a plateau. The statistical method developed by Google is much better than the decades-old, rule-based attempts to use software to simulate human thinking. But why is Google’s approach so much better? Because it is based on human thinking. A sentence that is so cleverly translated by software sounds perfect only because it was originally translated by a clever human.

An algorithm will sometime find a perfect or almost perfect match for another sentence in another language. But often, perhaps due to a difference in one word, or a misplaced comma, it will say the opposite of what was in fact meant in that other language. How do you overcome this dilemma? More.

See: Patenttranslator’s Blog

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