Machine translation

technology

The first domain in which neural methods reached the threshold of ordinary usefulness, the domain the transformer was invented for, and the domain where "human parity" was claimed earliest and disproved most instructively. In 2018 Läubli, Sennrich and Volk re-ran a parity claim on the Chinese–English news task and found the claim survived only under sentence-level evaluation: when professional raters were shown whole documents, they preferred human translation clearly, because the errors that distinguish the two are errors of cohesion, reference and consistency that a sentence cannot expose. Coverage has since widened faster than quality has been established — Google added 110 languages in June 2024, taking Translate to roughly 243 and adding languages spoken by some 614 million people, using a general-purpose language model rather than paired training corpora. That is a real change in access, and it is not the same claim as a change in quality, because for most of those languages no evaluation of comparable rigour exists at all.

A technology is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.