Why are humans scared of robots? — Some people love them. Others are interested but cautious. Still, others are fearful. Why do we have such different reactions to robots? The answer, both complicated and fascinating, depends on a number of factors. …

In conversation with Gesche Ipsen — In “Sprache und Sein” Kübra Gümüşay explores the question of how language shapes our thinking and determines power relations in our society. The book has now been published in English translation. We talked to the translator, Gesche Ipsen, about her work on the book and the linguistic power of translation. …

In the near future, quantum computers could contribute significantly towards the development of clean technologies. Could is the operative word — you see, it’s not yet certain whether a sufficiently robust computer of this type can be built in the next ten to twenty years. …

In conversation with Michael Měchura — Language technologist Michal Měchura has always wanted a tool that allows machine translators to ask humans questions about ambiguous phrases. With Fairslator, he has developed such a tool himself. Michal talks to us about bias and ambiguity in automatic translations. By Stephanie Hesse Michal Měchura, one of the first sentences…

Interview with Pieter Vermaas — When Pieter Vermaas was recently asked to speak at a conference on quantum computing, he was posed the following question: Will society reject quantum technology? To Vermaas, this was the wrong question. By Katie McCormick “The mindset is, ‘Okay, we are developing the technology. Then, society is potentially burning down.’…

About connotations — Words can carry invisible baggage, and potentially emotive baggage at that. Translators cannot simply ditch the baggage. By Tove Andersson While dictionaries and encyclopaedias have considerable power to define, they do not tell the whole story. When a group or individual in Norway reacts to a word, comments sections and…

The Quality of Machine Translation — Literary translators have long used computers for basic assistance, for example in the form of online dictionaries and corpora, but they have also long been resistant to the idea that machine translation (MT) — or even computer-assisted translation tools such as translation memory — can have any significant role to…

How is literary translation different from other forms of translation? To oversimplify a little, non-literary translation such as commercial, legal, medical etc. tends to focus on the meaning of a text, while literary translation focuses almost equally strongly on the style of the text. By Roy Youdale Literary style concerns…

Understanding Neural Machine Translation — When Google Translate was first launched in 2006, it could only translate two languages. By 2016, it was supporting over 103 languages and translating over 100 billion words a day. Now, not only does it translate, but it can also transcribe eight of the most widely spoken languages in real…