When Microsoft and Skype revealed Skype Translator in May, everyone displayed awe and wonder at a service that could finally traverse the language barrier. The premise was that the Skype Translator app would convert speech in real time allowing fluid conversation between speaking partners with different lingual tongues…
First, Microsoft took the traditional approach, but instead of only mapping phrases between languages, the team went a step further and mapped individual words as well. This helped overcome grammatical inconsistencies across languages. However, this soon brought them to social media where each platform—primarily Facebook, SMS, and Twitter—brought a unique challenge. The researchers adapted “social media text nomalization platform” to their existing system and improved text translation by six percent with one developer saying “it really did move the needle on understanding and translating that type of data better.”
via Gizmodo
