How Google is using emerging AI techniques to improve language translation quality

Google says it's made progress toward improving translation quality for languages that don't have a copious amount of written text. In a forthcoming blog post, the company details new innovations that have enhanced the user experience in the 108 languages (particularly in data-poor languages Yoruba and Malayalam) supported by Google Translate, its service that translates an average of 150 billion words daily. In the 13 years since the public debut of Google Translate, techniques like neural machine translation, rewriting-based paradigms, and on-device processing have led to quantifiable leaps in the platform's translation accuracy. But until recently, even the state-of-the-art algorithms underpinning Translate lagged behind human performance. Efforts beyond Google illustrate the magnitude of the problem -- the Masakhane project, which aims to render thousands of languages on the African continent automatically translatable, has yet to move beyond the data-gathering and transcription phase.