Facebook's new AI can translate languages directly into one another

Whether you're logging on from the US, Brazil, Borneo, or France, Facebook can translate virtually any written content published on its platform into the local language using automated machine translation. In fact, Facebook provides around 20 billion translations everyday for its News Feed alone. However these systems typically use English as an intermediary step -- that is, translating from Chinese to French actually goes Chinese to English to French. This is done because data sets of translations to and from English are massive and widely available but putting English in the middle reduces the overall translation accuracy while making the entire process more complex and cumbersome than it needs to be. That's why Facebook AI has developed a new MT model that can bidirectionally translate directly between two languages (Chinese to French and French to Chinese) without ever using English as a crutch -- and which outperforms the English-centric model by 10 points on BLEU metrics.