[quoting Alessi, 27 Feb 96.b] You are right that in the recent Deep Blue chess match, the IBM computer Deep Blue lost the MATCH to a grand master. I think you were a bit crafty in not pointing out that Deep Blue DID win ONE of the games. Not too many years ago, chess players said even THAT would never happen.
Yeah but, my point is that chess is easy and English is difficult.
When language translators become available, most people (even multilingual people) will be DELIGHTED to use them rather than learn new languages that they do not already know. Yes, communicating through a translator may be a slow and painful process, but learning new languages (as an adult) is even slower.
Right. Here in Japan, small portable bilingual dictionaries are selling quite well. There are also small phrase translators with expressions like "How much for one hour?" and "Don't kill me. You can have my wallet." These are canned expressions though. No real translation is taking place.
There is a company in Europe with a web site that does on-line translation. I tried it, but the result came back scrambled, so I can't comment.