Tags
translation linguistics language

An amazing step forward in the translation of languages has been made thanks to human and artificial intelligence working together. According to an article in this week's New Scientist, treating languages as a secret code might be the way forward in improving machine translation and much more. By approaching translation as a cryptographic problem, as if the text was written in an advanced cipher of English, scientists have created highly successful 'monolingual' translations. This inspiring and certainly very ambitious method has allowed scientists to decipher for the first time in history, with no human intervention, messages from San Francisco's 1960s Zodiac killer whose real identity is still unknown today. Scientist Sujith Ravi from the University of Southern California wants to really push boundaries; he explains that their methodology will allow them to 'crack the code' for all modern languages, unknown ciphers, long lost languages, even dolphin-speak!