The oldest-known literary work, the Epic of Gilgamesh, was recast from the ancient Akkadian into other languages thousands of years ago and was possibly the first text to be translated. Fast-forward a few millennia and, although translators have mostly stopped carving cuneiform into stone tablets, translation long remained a difficult, painstaking process – until very recently, when machine translation changed everything.
Computer-assisted translation was once a very difficult problem to solve. Despite significant investment from the Soviet Union and the US military’s research division DARPA in the years following the Second World War, many attempts to crack the challenge fell flat.
So when Google released its initial translation service in 2006, it was an impressive if unreliable achievement, which relied on predictive algorithms that are rudimentary by today’s standards. But when the company switched from “statistical machine translation” to a neural network a decade later, its machine translations were vastly improved.