“We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a few years’ time,” said Franz Och, Google’s head of translation services.
“Clearly, for it to work smoothly, you need a combination of high-accuracy machine translation and high-accuracy voice recognition, and that’s what we’re working on.
…
“The more data we input, the better the quality,” said Och. There is no shortage of help. “There are a lot of language enthusiasts out there,” he said.
Share an article »
ProZ.com blog »
Poland
Local time: 18:25
English to Polish
+ ...
"Clearly, for it to work smoothly, you need a combination of high-accuracy machine translation and high-accuracy voice recognition (...)."
At present we have achieved none of the above. But in 5 year's time...
Thailand
Local time: 18:25
English to French
Sure. It should improve the quality of chinese household appliances manuals translations. For the rest, it should rely on good quality source text/language, which is not always the case.
France
Local time: 18:25
French to English
+ ...
We'll get perfect translation about the same time we get 100% accurate waether forecasting - i.e. never.
We might get acceptible translation within my lifetime but I'm not holding my breath. To correctly translate even the most basic of text, you first need to *understand* it. For understanding you need real AI and that has been 20 years away ever since I can remember (and that is more time than I care to admit!)
To report site rules violations or get help, contact a site moderator:
You can also contact site staff by submitting a support request »
This discussion can also be accessed via the ProZ.com forum pages.