Source: Chris Davies, Slash Gear
Reading your Facebook friends’ statuses might typically make your blood boil these days, but at least the translations of foreign language posts are getting better. The social network says that it has retired its old translation system and replaced it with a shiny new neural machine system, which is much better at accounting for things like local slang and context. The result, Facebook claims, is smarter translation for all.
While the ability to drop a chunk of text in one language into a service like Google Translate, and have it emerge in another within milliseconds, isn’t new, Facebook’s challenge is arguably more arduous. Unlike carefully written and edited news reports, technical papers, and other documents online, Facebook statuses aren’t necessarily going to be written in perfect examples of the user’s native tongue. That has the potential to trip up a traditional system. Read entire article…