Machine Translation Seminar

Today Stephen Richardson visited the Computer Science department of BYU and spoke about machine translation and how it’s used in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. He spoke of the problems associated with machine translation and also about how it cuts down costs of translation. Human translators can use the computer automated translation and then simply correct it, therefore speeding up the process. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints translates a large amount of material in many languages, and the Church currently has machine translation available for 29 languages. In fact, the Church has this translator online, similar to Google Translate. The Church’s translator is customized based on Church materials like Conference talks and the scriptures. I found this seminar interesing, as I’m double majoring in Computer Science and Spanish Translation.