IBM's Translation Engine Polished by Human Hands
IBM’s 400,000 employees spread across 170 countries are adding a human touch to n.Fluent, a project to build a real-time translation engine to support two persons sitting in two different corners of the world not knowing a single bit of each other’s native language, using common chat software and talking freely.
One person writes the contents in his language which get translated instantly in other person’s language and then delivered to him, the other person replies in his own language that gets translated in sender’s language on his screen.
The translation is not simple word-by-word translation that most of the time does not make good sense after translation. It is intelligent phonetic translation.
On the other hand IBM really played smart by offering small gifts to its own employees for helping to complete this versatile and cumbersome project by correcting millions of words and phrases that are part of the translation engine. Had they not involved their own employees and hired a workforce from the outside world, it would have cost them millions.
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