Machine Translation: how does it work?

Translators increasingly need to be well-versed not just in linguistics, but also in technology. Just as the worlds of typography, accounting, medicine, and a myriad of other industries were revolutionized in recent decades by computers and information technology, translators need to understand the evolving impact of technology on their own profession.

In the future, the greatest divide that may develop will be between technologically-fluent translators —who understand the technology revolutionizing their profession — and those who limit their interests exclusively to the field of linguistics.

To this end, we present the following article. Adam Geitgey recently posted a series of blogs on Medium entitled “Machine Learning is Fun.” Part 5 highlights “Language Translation with Deep Learning and the Magic of Sequences.” It does a good job giving a description of the underlying change from semantic rules-based translation to the current trends of statistical translation and recurrent neural networks.

What other resources have you used to educate yourself on the evolving role of Machine Translation in the industry? Do you remain leery of MT technology, or do you embrace it in your work? We’d love to hear your thoughts. Email us at projects@e2f.com and let us know.