Google Translate: It Already Speaks as Well as a 10-Year-Old. How Good Can it Get?

In his wonderful book, Is That a Fish in Your Ear?, the Princeton linguist and translator David Bellos notes the link between early machine translation pioneers and modern philosophers of language--that hopeless pursuit to discover "the purely hypothetical language which all people really speak in the great basement of their souls." When I spoke to Bellos about Google, he stressed that Google's achievements doesn't make Google Translate akin to how human translation actually works. Though a translation is what you get, translation isn't really what Google Translate does. "It's like the difference between engineering and knowledge," says Bellos. "An engineering solution is to make something work, but the way you make it work doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the underlying things. Airplanes do not work the way birds fly."