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 ...

Ask most computer programmers what would happen if, suddenly, their computers got a thousand times faster. Most would rhapsodize about being able to immediately put that extra power to good use. Ask ...

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 ...

THOSE passingly familiar with machine translation (MT) may well have reacted in the following ways at some point. “Great!” would be one such, on plugging something into the best-known public and free ...

Kurzweil shares his thoughts on the future of language technology. We live in a world where language technologies, still in their infancy, are powerful enough to turn your web browser into a text ...

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 ...

Recently, on the eighth floor of an office building in Arlington, Va., Rachael held her finger down on a Dell Streak touchscreen and asked Aziz whether he knew the village elder. The handheld tablet ...

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.