Google To Improve Machine Translation

Universal translators are either magical and earnest, able to make interlocutors lipsynch to translationa the way explosions make noise in space, or they're magical and funny, like babelfish. Google aims to get this little holy grail sorted out once and for all, making machinetrans (a)instant, (b)mobile, and (c)accurate.

Their new approach is called "statistical machine translation" and aims to solve some of the unintentional humor problems of current systems. The first couple of grafs from the linked Reuters story, translated to Italian and back again with Google Translate, follow after the jump.

Google seeks world of instant translations [Reuters]

THE MOUNTAIN VIEW, California (Reuters) - The vision of the future, people of Google Inc. will be able immediately translate documents in main languages of the world, with logic of the machine, not expert linguisti, leading the sense.

The method of the Google, called automatic translation statistics, differs gives from the efforts passes in how much renunciation to the language experts who program the grammaticali rules and the dictionaries in the computers. Instead, they feed the documents that the human beings already have translate in two languages and then that they count on the computers in order to discern the models for the future translations.

While the quality is not perfect, it is an improvement on the efforts previous to the automatic translation ... for some duties, a mainly corrected translation can be enough good.