Automatic translation and manual translation

A conference was held for specialists in automatic translation at the Sorbonne University on the 23rd June in order to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the association.

In the 60’s, linguist Yehoshua Bar-Hillel announced that an automatic translation of high quality could never exist. She believed that translation is only possible if we are able to understand the text. For 40 years linguists, who reject the possibility of a high quality automatic translation, and mathematicians, who believe that it is possible due to large sections of text available in different languages, have been debating this very subject. Automatic translation has been revolutionised due to the eruption of Google. This is due to its capacity to create statistics using is gigantic databases whilst offering online translation services.