Machine translation

You may recall something I included last June on machine translation. This two minute audio clip from Web Search as a Force for Good, a speech given at Stanford University by Peter Norvig, Google's Director of Search Quality, on 7/11/2004, sheds light on how the company is developing machine translation. It is using the huge processing power available to it, alongside the increasing body of digitised works (EU documents, out-of-copyright novels, millions of titles being digitised for Google Book Search, etc.) that are available in multiple languages, already translated by professionals. Google is definitely getting somewhere. This 2005 evaluation of the output from several machine translation systems from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology has Google's translations "winning" in all the categories evaluated.