How Google translations are getting more natural

Mumbai: Researchers are increasingly striving to help machines translate words from one language to another the way professional translators would. This implies that machines must understand the context of words and sentences, and make sense of idioms, phrases and jokes. However, despite the fact that billions of words are being translated daily by multilingual machine translation services like Google Translate, Microsoft Translator, Systran's Pure Neural Machine Translator, WordLingo, SDL FreeTranslation, China's Baidu, Russia's Yandex or Babel Fish, machines have a long way to go before they can function as fluently as humans do when speaking in, and translating, different tongues. Barak Turovsky, product lead at Google Translate--a free multilingual machine translation service from Google Inc.--understands this dilemma well. "Today, translation by machines can be likened to my five-year-old son speaking Russian. Since I speak fluent Russian, I know the mistakes he makes and how he forms words," he says.