There are added problems of length, meter and rhyme a computer has to solve to understand and translate poetry. At a conference a few months ago, Dmitriy Genzel, a research scientist at Google, presented a paper outlining those problems and described the ways Google’s computers work to solve them.

Researchers have no way around the pick-and-choose process, so the translations are far from instant and no beta is public. But there’s a reason why it’s useful to improve translation software of any kind, Genzel says.

“Most of the content on the Web is not in English anymore,” he says. “So even for English speakers, there’s a huge amount of stuff on the Web that you don’t have access to.”

In poetry, the translating perspective is more difficult. The value of preserving meter and rhyme in poetic translation has been highly debated. Vladimir Nabokov famously claimed that, since it is impossible to preserve both the
meaning and the form of the poem in translation, one must abandon the form altogether.”But there’s quite a big aspect of [poetry translation] that machines can do pretty well,” Genzel says. Listen to the story.

See: NPR