Google's AI can translate language pairs it has never seen

The company recently switched its Translate feature to the deep-learning Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT) system. That's an "end-to-end learning framework that learns from millions of examples," the company says, and has drastically improved translation quality. The problem is, Google Translate works with 103 languages, meaning there are 5,253 language "pairs" to be translated. If you multiply that by the millions of examples needed for training, it's insanely CPU intensive. After training the system with several language pairs like English-to-Japanese and English-to-Korean, researchers wondered if they could translate a pair that the system hadn't learned yet.