Lilt is building a machine translation business with humans at the core

The ability to quickly and automatically translate anything you see using a web service is a powerful one, yet few expect much from it other than a tolerable version of a foreign article, menu, or street sign. Shouldn’t this amazing tool be put to better use? It can be, and a company called Lilt is quietly doing so — but crucially, it isn’t even trying to leave the human element behind.

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The WT2 in-ear translator arrives in January, with real-time feedback coming soon

Timekettle was eager to show us the progress it’s made on the WT2 since it first showed us its wearable translation device at TechCrunch Shenzhen, this time last year. Unlike their 3D printed state at last year’s event, the crowdfunded earpieces are now ready to ship. They’ve already started going out to early backers and […]

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SwiftKey on Android now has two-way translation baked in. Qué bien

The Internet is of course amazing if you want to send messages across borders. But different languages can still put a wrinkle in your conversational flow, even with all the handy translation apps also on tap to help turn zut alors into shucks! So Microsoft -owned SwiftKey is probably still onto something with a new […]

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Google Docs gets an AI grammar checker

You probably don’t want to make grammar errors in your emails (or blog posts), but every now and then, they do slip in. Your standard spell-checking tool won’t catch them unless you use an extension like Grammarly. Well, Grammarly is getting some competition today in the form of a new machine learning-based grammar checker from […]

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Fb Messenger auto-translation chips at US/Mexico language wall

Facebook’s been criticized for tearing America apart, but now it will try to help us forge bonds with our neighbors to the south. Facebook Messenger will now offer optional auto-translation of English to Spanish and vice-versa for all users in the United States and Mexico. It’s a timely launch given the family separation troubles at […]

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Judge says ‘literal but nonsensical’ Google translation isn’t consent for police search

Machine translation of foreign languages is undoubtedly a very useful thing, but if you’re going for anything more than directions or recommendations for lunch, its shallowness is a real barrier. And when it comes to the law and constitutional rights, a “good enough” translation doesn’t cut it, a judge has ruled.

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Google brings offline neural machine translations for 59 languages to its Translate app

Currently, when the Google Translate apps for iOS and Android has access to the internet, its translations are far superior to those it produces when it’s offline. That’s because the offline translations are phrase-based, meaning they use an older machine translation technique than the machine learning-powered systems in the cloud that the app has access to […]

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Microsoft launches a unified API for all of its AI speech services

At its Build developer conference in Seattle this week, Microsoft is putting a lot of emphasis on its AI and machine learning services. For the most part, that means launching new services and bringing some existing services to new places. With the plethora of different AI services the company now offers, it’s maybe also no […]

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Emmanuel Macron’s ‘delicious wife’ comment leaves people scratching heads

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There’s no doubting French President Emmanuel Macron’s excellent grasp of English.

But given French and English share numerous words that sound similar but have different meanings, there’s bound to be some expressions that get lost in translation.

Macron, who is currently visiting Australia, left people scratching their heads when he referred to the Australian prime minister’s wife, Lucy Turnbull, as “delicious” at a press conference on Wednesday. 

“I want to thank you for your welcome, you and your delicious wife,” he said.

Sometimes translation is tough
“I want to thank you for your welcome, you and your delicious wife” @EmmanuelMacron says to @TurnbullMalcolm pic.twitter.com/bIn6kokiYW

— ABC Sydney (@abcsydney) May 2, 2018 Read more…

More about Australia, French, Language, Translation, and Emmanuel Macron

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Microsoft Translator gets offline AI translations

Chances are you mostly need a translator app on your phone while you are traveling. But that’s also when you are most likely to not have any connectivity. While most translation apps still work when they are offline, they can’t use the sophisticated — and computationally intense — machine learning algorithms in the cloud that […]

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Microsoft announces breakthrough in Chinese-to-English machine translation

A team of Microsoft researchers announced on Wednesday they’ve created the first machine translation system that’s capable of translating news articles from Chinese to English with the same accuracy as a person. The company says it’s tested the system repeatedly on a sample of around 2,000 sentences from various online newspapers, comparing the result to […]

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SignAll is slowly but surely building a sign language translation platform

 Translating is difficult work, the more so the further two languages are from one another. French-Spanish? Not a problem. Ancient Greek-Esperanto? Hard. But sign language is uniquely difficult because it is fundamentally different from spoken and…

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