What Small Businesses Should Know About Neural Machine Translation
Among the list of technologies that have radically changed our economy in the last year is a handful that did not receive the same level of attention as artificial intelligence or self-driving cars. One, in particular, is called Neural Machine Translation (NMT), a major breakthrough in language technology that some believe is a turning point in how business gets done.
The Internet and the connectivity it facilitates is primarily responsible for what we now call the global economy. Emails, web pages, and mobile applications have created a marketplace for ideas and products, as well as empowered organizations to collaborate instantly from thousands of miles away. But for as small as the world is today, it can get smaller, and language is a major part of that.
NMT, a deep learning technology, appears to have achieved a breakthrough in fluency that will have far ranging impacts throughout the business world. “Linguistic technology that works at fluent or near-fluent levels would be enormously impactful for business of all sizes,” says Denish Gachot, CEO of Systran Group, a leading company in the language tech industry. “Language barriers are still regularly identified as one of the primary obstacles to getting deals done, to reaching new markets, and impeding the efficiency of business operations.”
If you are not already familiar with NMT, here are three things you need to know.
The last few years have seen huge leaps in machine translation abilities. Most anyone who has used the Internet has interfaced with a translation tool at some point – be it on Facebook or the Google translation feature – and likely experienced extreme disappointment. What makes NMT different from its predecessors is its soft-alignment, or its ability to translate entire sentences based on context and language patterns, rather than just going word by word.
Systran’s version of NMT, known as Pure Neural Machine Translation (PNMT), was one of the first to reach the market. It is currently capable of translating between more than 100 different languages. And because of the almost human intuition of soft-alignment processing, this open-network frame allows the system to provide more reliable, accurate translations than have ever been available before.
Small businesses can benefit from this technology in a number of ways.
