Machine translation

In a 2010 post, I wrote:

Machines and bilingualism: I had a terrifying thought the other day. I would guess that at 90 percent confidence level machine translation and voice recognition will be good enough in 20 years that people will be able to communicate pretty well across most language barriers using cheap and unobtrusive devices. If so, is it worth all this effort to make sure my kids are bilingual?

I say it's terrifying because of the significant effort we're expending on our Bilingual Kids Project -- including relocating to Taiwan for this sabbatical. Another point of clarification: I'm not saying in 20 years we'll have AI (far from it). But something that translates basic phrases and simple content (surely we'll have that: Moore's law, massive corpora of translated text, statistical machine learning, yada yada) would reduce significantly the value of all but the most sophisticated language skills. This video shows the current state of the art from Microsoft Research. See the realtime speech to speech (English to Chinese) demo starting at just before 6 minutes in. The demo could have been faked a bit -- Rashid might be sticking to a prepared script -- but let's hope it was legitimate.