Translation Technology Is Getting Better. What Does That Mean For The Future?

Tools and apps like Google Translate are getting better and better at translating one language into another. Alexander Waibel, professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute (@LTIatCMU), tells Here & Now's Jeremy Hobson how translation technology works, where there's still room to improve and what could be in store in the decades to come. "Over the years I think there's been a big trend on translation to go increasingly from rule-based, knowledge-based methods to learning methods. Systems have now really achieved a phenomenally good accuracy, and so I think, within our lifetime I'm fairly sure that we'll reach -- if we haven't already done so -- human-level performance, and/or exceeding it. "The current technology that really has taken the community by storm is of course neural machine translation.