Christopher Reid

While attending a localization conference in Warsaw a few years back, I heard the chief technology officer of a well-known machine translation (MT) company refer to the results of his engine as just that – "magical." I found this troubling because, for a chief technology officer, MT should not be magic — in fact, it should probably be the exact opposite of magic. Still, the question of whether MT is magic cannot be easily dismissed. Speculations about magical MT or AI run rampant throughout the internet, and the suggestion even appeared recently in the New York Times.