When I think of Michel de Nostredame (Nostradamus), the French philosopher and seer, I picture a delusional character who lived in the 16th century, writing with a feather in a candle-lit room. Every time I hear about the many disturbing predictions he made, I get the chills. Thankfully, my more practical side quickly takes over and I tell myself, “forget about it, this is not real.”
His real prophecies are compelling, but there may also be “prophecies” attributed to him that he didn’t actually make….
The internet has given rise to a proliferation of communications that occur each day in every corner of the globe, carried out by people engaged in conversations representing the majority of the world’s approximate 6,700 living languages. Each passing day, volumes of additional translated content becomes available, providing for the creation of more dictionaries for use in rule-based machine translation engines, as well as translated data that both statistical machine translation and hybrid engines can learn from. As a result, we’ve seen huge improvements in many of the more common language direction pairs, such as English to French and Chinese from English.
Going forward, the biggest challenge to achieving a comprehensive single language reality will be the work necessary to create engines for less common directional language pairs, such as Hindi to Spanish or Chinese from Portuguese….
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