Google Translate Can Teach Itself

A new Google Translate system of artificial intelligence called Zero Shot Translation can now create translations between multiple different pairs of languages -- even pairings the system has never been exposed to before. In a blog post Tuesday, a trio of Google researchers explain how upgrades to their recently unveiled Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT) system pinpoint the required target language and allow for translations between different combinations of languages, sight-unseen. This means Google Translate can now translate, say, Korean into Japanese, despite having received no Korean-into-Japanese training data. An accompanying research paper was published in Cornell University's arXiv ("archive"), an online repository for scientific research papers. Last week, the Google Translate team announced it had the ability to translate whole sentences, as opposed to merely reading things as a succession of discrete individual words.