But for the moment, let’s turn our faces from the past. A new story is brewing over the horizon, one that poses a challenge to that longstanding role. I’m talking, of course, about machine translation. What does its rise mean for the language industry? Will we ever see a future where machine translation has perfected itself, and if so, what place does that leave for translators?
Let’s begin our journey for answers to these questions. This article will be an extended thought exercise on the future of machine translation, the role of the translator in that future, and the inevitability of what we would like to call the translation singularity.
When we talk about the future of the translation industry, the oman mobile database figure of machine translation inevitably pops up in the discussion. Within the past decade, machine translation has significantly transformed the industry landscape, and while it is far from perfect, research and development into this technology continues to make breakthroughs at an accelerating pace.
Under the singularity, artificial intelligence overtakes our own, and will change the world in ways that are beyond our wildest imagination.
The theme of continued technological improvement is a fundamental theme in science fiction. We build machines that can solve problems that are normally beyond the capability of man, and over time we get closer to building the perfect machine—a machine that not only solves these problems, but can continually improve itself without human input.