For The First Time, AI Can Teach Itself Any Language On Earth

To understand the potential of these new systems, it helps to know how current machine translation works. The current de facto standard is Google Translate, a system that covers 103 languages from Afrikaans to Zulu, including the top 10 languages in the world–in order, Mandarin, Spanish, English, Hindi, Bengali, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, German, and Javanese. Google's system uses human-supervised neural networks that compare parallel texts–books and articles that have been previously translated by humans. By comparing extremely large amounts of these parallel texts, Google Translate learns the equivalences between any two given languages, thus acquiring the ability to quickly translate between them. Sometimes the translations are funny or don't really capture the original meaning but, in general, they are functional and, overtime, they're getting better and better.