Google taps big data for universal translator

Google Translate is currently best known for being a quick and dirty way to render Web pages or short text snippets in another language. But according to Der Spiegel, the next step for the core technology behind that service is a device that amounts to the universal translator from "Star Trek." Apparently everyone from Facebook to Microsoft is ramping up similar ambitions: to create services that eradicate language barriers as we currently know them. Machine translation has been around in one form or another for decades, but has always lagged far behind translations produced by human hands. Much of the software written to perform machine translation involved defining different languages' grammars and dictionaries, a difficult and inflexible process.