In a previous post (Progress in Machine Translation – Backtranslation samples then and now), I used the technique of backtranslation to demonstrate the progress of machine translation over the last few years. In this post, I am using the same technique in an opposite way, to sho

Today, a smartphone with a translation app can be an invaluable tool when travelling in a country where you don’t know the language, as testified by this article appearing today in the New York Times: “Lost in Translation -Try a Google App“. I recently had an experie

I like reading the online news in Spanish, as a way of learning Spanish. To facilitate my learning, it is great to be able to generate a quick translation of a word or sentence and easily compare it to the original text. The most convenient way I have found to do this is with the free

Machine Translation Explorations This blog is a place for me to share one of my interests, Machine Translation, and more generally, Artificial Intelligence.  As a translator for some 25 years, I am mainly interested in how Machine Translation is directly impacting the work of translat

Ten years ago, I viewed machine translation more as a joke than as a useful translation tool. Thus I included an amusing machine translation experiment in the humour section of my website: A Folksinger Christine Lavin had investigated the results of automatic translation of some of he

As a first entry in this blog, I would like to draw attention to the prediction of Ray Kurzweil (The Singularity Is Near, 2005) that machine intelligence will overtake human intelligence around mid-century.  This point has been named the “singularity”. “The technolog