It's a fascinating concept

Notoriously hard to translate one language to another - how to carry across cultural information linguistically encoded, idiom and so on (and remember idioms change - or do you listen to the latest hip sounds from the trap scene and exclaim "that's a stone groove, Daddio!" - please, please tell me you don't...not to mention regional variation (English has some, I'd argue German (for example) has more).

I guess you can take digitised books and digitised literary translations of books (so mass translations done by human experts), train machine learning algorithms on that stuff and so on. But...wow...the complexity would be staggering.

I'd love to know more about how they do it; and I'd be really wary of using it in a critical situation (health, business etc). As long as the other person was not going to take offence at things it might come out with it might be quite good for tourists - more mass market than specialist but that's probably where the money is anyway for something like that.

Posted By: Old Man, May 24, 20:09:30