INTERNATIONAL NEWS - Google has added a number of languages to Google Translate including Zulu, Xhosa and Swahili. Its new machine learning system has reduced errors significantly.
Google published a paper last year that stated that its GNMT system has reduced translation errors by an average of 60% when compared to the older method.
Neural Machine Translation (NMT) is an end-to-end learning approach for automated translation, with the potential to overcome many of the weaknesses of conventional phrase-based translation systems.
The development will allow translations to be closer to spoken language than with previous machines.
Head of the Machine Intelligence Division at Google, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, has praised the accuracy of this new system. He said that the previous translations were based on programming an understanding of the grammar of a language into the translator.
He added that the text that had already been translated across many languages was fed into the Artificial Intelligence system, which helped it learn how to execute translations exactly. “In our testing we’ve found that the machine is alarmingly accurate, even if it does struggle a bit with context.”
