13 June 2011
James Fallows has an interesting take on some of the problems that Google has run into with its automatic translation API. The problems aren’t linguistic, they’re economic. And ironically, as the API was used more, it “polluted” the data pool to such an extent that it became impossible to improve the system’s performance. Fallows concludes that, “for the foreseeable future, it’s still worth learning other languages.”
