In a meeting at Google in 2004, the discussion turned to an e-mail message the company had received from a fan in South Korea. Sergey Brin, a Google founder, ran the message through an automatic ...

Kurzweil shares his thoughts on the future of language technology. We live in a world where language technologies, still in their infancy, are powerful enough to turn your web browser into a text ...

Only Slate Plus members can gift Slate stories. Become a member to share 10 free articles a month. A computer that translates “natural language” is the holy grail of artificial intelligence—language ...

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to travel to a foreign country without having to worry about the nuisance of communicating in a different language? Receive emails about upcoming NOVA programs and related ...

The English/Dari critical care manuals help with treatments at outposts such as Forward Operating Base Lightning near Gardez, Afghanistan. Military medical personnel have teamed with computer ...

Online translators are getting better, but there’s still room for improvement. Researchers are now contributing new artificial intelligence techniques that could help accurately build full sentences.

Only Slate Plus members can gift Slate stories. Become a member to share 10 free articles a month. Recently, on the eighth floor of an office building in Arlington, Va., Rachael held her finger down ...

THOSE passingly familiar with machine translation (MT) may well have reacted in the following ways at some point. “Great!” would be one such, on plugging something into the best-known public and free ...

The Internet is an American invention, and though it has spread around the world, the bulk of the communication conducted through it is still in English. Even so, depending on what you're doing, you ...