Machine translation, no match for humans: machines translate words, humans the underlying message University of Helsinki

Many of us are familiar with Google Translate, translation applications for travellers' smartphones and the instruction manuals of various devices and products. Professional translators also make use of machines. Training a computer to translate between two specific languages takes millions of sentences or billions of words worth of text. Maarit Koponen, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki, is investigating which errors made by machines lead to misunderstandings and how those mistakes could be identified. The learning algorithms behind machine translation are called artificial intelligence, but machines are not intelligent in the way humans or the super AIs of science-fiction films are.