AI translates news just as well as a human would

Translation was traditionally considered a job in which the magic human touch would always ultimately trump a machine. That may no longer be the case, as a Microsoft AI translator just nailed one of the hardest challenges: translating Chinese into English with accuracy comparable to that of a bilingual person. Chinese is so difficult a language that it takes years for a non-native speaker to just about manage the 3,000 characters needed to read a newspaper. Previous attempts at automatic translation have amused the world, with gems such as "hand grenade" to indicate a fire extinguisher or a mysterious "whatever" dish on a restaurant menu. "For alphabetic languages, there's what they call a virtuous loop between the writing, speaking and listening -- those three categories constitute one composite skill," linguist David Moser told the Los Angeles Times.