Ever since the first demonstration of machine translation technology in 1954, the field has undergone constant evolution. Compared to its humble beginnings and the somewhat incoherent results of the word-to-word, rules-based machine translations (RBMT) of the 70s, 80s and 90s, current machine translation is vastly more sophisticated. Today, machine translation uses a much more intuitive Neural Machine Translation (NMT), so you would be a fool to speak badly in your native tongue in front of your “foreign” but mobile phone/google translate savvy mother-in-law. 

Neural Machine Translation uses artificial neural networks modelled on the workings of the human brain to predict the likelihood of a sequence of words. It translates text by looking at entire sentences at once rather than individual words, much like we do when reading documents in our native language(s). This helps us understand the full meaning of the document and allows us to pick up on nuances that provide sub-textual information.  

Earlier this year Altlaw were very pleased to learn that Relativity was launching an integrated AI (machine) translation function within RelativityOne. It is, of course, important to understand that this is not a replacement for human translation, and AI translation is not court admissible, but having dealt with translation projects of all sizes and complexity through the years, this has long been identified as a feature that would bring huge benefits by being fully integrated.