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 ...

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 ...

A computer that translates “natural language” is the holy grail of artificial intelligence—language being so integral to our intelligence and to our humanness that to crack it would be to achieve ...

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 ...

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 ...

Anyone who's turned to a website to translate a foreign language knows that perfect computer translation remains elusive. That's especially true for hundreds of lesser-known languages. So linguists ...

The Internet is an American invention, and though it has spread around the world, the bulk of the communication conducted through it is still in English. Even so, depending on what you're doing, you ...

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 ...

The European Commission has made freely available its collection of about 1 million sentences, and their high quality translations, in 22 of the 23 official EU languages -- including those of the new ...

The potential usefulness of automatic computerized translation was recognized by the very first AI researchers in the 1950s. But it wasn’t until new algorithms emerged in the 1980s and 1990s that the ...