The Last Frontier of Machine Translation
When Google Translate was released, in 2006, I was an eighth grader stumbling through introductory Spanish, and my teacher had little reason to worry about her students using it to cheat. It’s almost hard to remember now, but early machine-translation systems were laughably poor. They could give you the general thrust of, say, a Portuguese website, but they often failed at even basic tasks. In one case from 2010, a Google-translated summons reportedly instructed a defendant to avoid court instead of showing up there.
Machine translation didn’t become the juggernaut we know until 2015, when Baidu released its large-scale neural machine-translation system, built with the same basic architecture that chatbots such as ChatGPT use today. Google started switching from a statistical model to a neural system not long after, as did peers such as Systran and Microsoft Translator. It was a major leap forward: Tourists can order coffee and haggle for knickknacks thanks to the magic of Google Translate; I’ve occasionally used , an AI tool,
