Imagine it’s the 1950s and you’re in charge of one of the world’s first electronic computers. A company approaches you and says: “We have 10 million words of French text that we’d like to translate ...

In a meeting at Google in 2004, the discussion turned to an e-mail message the company had received from a fan in South Korea. Sergey Brin, a Google founder, ran the message through an automatic ...

IN “STAR TREK” it was a hand-held Universal Translator; in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” it was the Babel Fish popped conveniently into the ear. In science fiction, the meeting of distant ...

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to travel to a foreign country without having to worry about the nuisance of communicating in a different language? Receive emails about upcoming NOVA programs and related ...

AI and machine learning systems have become increasingly competent in recent years, capable of not just understanding the written word but writing it as well. But while these artificial intelligences ...

In the 23rd century, people will use a gizmo that looks suspiciously like a flashlight to communicate with alien species. That’s in the world of “Star Trek.” In the here and now, a small Marina del ...

Online translators are getting better, but there’s still room for improvement. Researchers are now contributing new artificial intelligence techniques that could help accurately build full sentences.

Online translators are getting better, but there’s still room for improvement. Researchers are now contributing new artificial intelligence techniques that could help accurately build full sentences.

Have you ever been in a situation where knowing another language would have come in handy? I remember standing on the platform at Tokyo Station watching my train to Nagano — the last train of the day ...