In Spanish, there are at least a dozen ways to say someone has the flu -- depending on the country. Translating "cardiac arrest" into Spanish is also tricky because "arresto" means getting detained by the police. Likewise, "intoxicado" means you have food poisoning, not that you're drunk. The examples of how translation could go awry in any language are endless: Words take on new meanings, idioms come and go, and communities adopt slang and dialects for everyday life. Human translators work hard to keep up with the changes, but California plans to soon entrust that responsibility to technology. State health policy officials want to harness emerging artificial intelligence technology to translate a broad swath of documents and websites related to "health and social services information, programs, benefits and services," according to state records.

This story was published in partnership with Type Investigations with support from the Puffin Foundation. In California, non-English speakers handed COVID-19 vaccination cards without information on what they mean. In Pennsylvania, people who speak Mandarin, Korean, and Japanese unable to make vaccine appointments due to a lack of interpreters at hospital call centers. These are just a few of the examples captured in a new complaint filed on Friday to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Office for Civil Rights, Federal Emergency Management Agency's Office of Equal Rights, and Department of Homeland Security's Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. The complaint, brought by the National Health Law Program, finds widespread problems across the country that inhibit access to COVID-19 resources for people with limited English proficiency (LEP).

Machine translation is an automated way to translate text or speech from one language to another. It can take volumes of data and provide translations into a large number of supported languages. Although not intended to fully replace human translators, it can provide value when immediate translations are needed for a wide variety of languages. If you're looking to translate content on the web, you have several options. Many popular browsers offer translation capabilities, which are either built in (e.g.

Can you imagine a mind without language? More specifically, can you imagine your mind without language? Can you think, plan, or relate to other people if you lack words to help structure your experiences? Many great thinkers have drawn a strong connection between language and the mind. Oscar Wilde called language "the parent, and not the child, of thought"; Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed that "the limits of my language mean the limits of my world"; and Bertrand Russell stated that the role of language is "to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it."

Aspects of an intelligent interface that provides natural language access to a large body of data distributed over a computer network are described. The overall system architecture is presented, showing how a user is buffered from the actual database management systems (DBMSs) by three layers of insulating components. These layers operate in series to convert natural language queries into calls to DBMSs at remote sites. Attention is then focused on the first of the insulating components, the natural language system. A pragmatic approach to language access that has proved useful for building interfaces to databases is described and illustrated by examples.

This paper discusses an effort in the application of artificial intelligence to the access of data from a large, distributed data base over a computer network. A running system is described that provides real-time access over the ARPANET to a data base distributed over several machines. The system accepts a rather wide range of natural language questions about the data, plans a sequence of appropriate queries to the data base management system to answer the question, determines on which machine(s) to carry out the queries, establishes links to those machines over the ARPANET, monitors the prosecution of the queries and recovers from certain errors in execution, and prepares a relevant answer. In addition to the components that make up the demonstration system, more sophisticated functionally equivalent components are discussed and proposed. The work described in this paper represents the joint efforts of an integrated, energetic group at SRI. Members of this group include Rich Fikes (now at Xerox PARC), Koichi Furukawa (now at ETL).