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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Hard to imagine but it has been 58 years since IBM and Georgetown University teamed up to run what they said was at the time the first English-to-Russian language computer translation program. Perhaps ...

The English/Dari critical care manuals help with treatments at outposts such as Forward Operating Base Lightning near Gardez, Afghanistan. Military medical personnel have teamed with computer ...

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 ...

Companies that once focused almost exclusively on preparing software and other high-tech products for export are entering some new markets of their own. Amid the tech slowdown of the past few years, ...