Traductor universal

Todavía estamos lejos del aparatito de Star Trek, pero hay avances en el campo de lo que se conoce como "machine translation".

Ya que estamos en el tema, yo creo que se deberían prohibir cuanto antes todos estos engendros del demonio. No vaya a ser que me quede sin laburo:

Machine translation has been an elusive goal since the earliest days of computer science. The Pentagon poured millions of dollars into efforts to get computers to translate Russian sentences into English. But disillusionment set in the 1960s when it became clear that producing results indistinguishable from a human translator wasn’t going to happen soon, if ever. The major obstacles were not computational but linguistic. The missing ingredient was a fuller understanding of language itself.

That is still true. But computational linguists are nowadays making greater strides by being less ambitious. They’ve come to realise that there are many tasks that need only rough translations—such as initial drafts for professional translators, or for experts who know the topic well. Success is also being achieved in fields where the subject domain is itself limited—weather reports, for example, or patent law, or medical diagnosis.

The main drivers for this more pragmatic approach to machine translation have been the enlargement of the European Union and the spread of the internet. Both have generated a pressing need for cheap and cheerful translations between numerous languages. In turn, this has spawned a wealth of new translation approaches.