“I think the goal for translation today is to make the language barrier disappear for people in everyday contexts…at work, when they’re traveling, so that they can communicate without a language barrier.” – Arul Menezes

 

Arul Menezes, Partner Research Manager of the Machine Translation team, spoke with Microsoft Research’s podcast team about the advances in machine translation, and how these techniques are impacting the way people communicate on a daily basis.

 

 

Menezes also shares a few recent announcements for the apps and add-ins that place Translator at the cutting edge of translation technologies today and explains the training methods that led to the recent human parity milestone, translating a news data set from Chinese to English.

 

“So, I think we live in an absolutely fascinating time, right? People have been working on AI for – or machine translation for that matter – for fifty, sixty years. And for decades, it was a real struggle. And I would say, just in the last ten years, with the advent of deep learning, we’re making amazing progress towards these really, really hard tasks that people, at some point, had almost given up hope…that we would ever be successful at recognizing speech or translating anywhere close to the level that a human can. But here we are. It’s a super exciting time.”

 

Listen to the podcast or read the transcript on the Microsoft Research blog.