Up until now I have agreed that although advancing more and more, machine translation (MT) will never replace human translation. For simply structured content and gisting, MT has become quite useful in reducing cost and time for localization. However, in more sophisticated tasks such as translating domain-specific content, marketing sites or even transcreation, MT has no place.

At the same time we cannot ignore the recent developments in machine learning, deep learning, and deep neural networks, to throw in a few buzz words. Speech recognition has come a long way, too. Latest releases of Cortana, Siri or Amazon’s Echo are a good example of the rapid progress of the technology.

I’m not a scientist and my knowledge in computational linguistic is certainly basic, but I want to point out a couple of related articles that made me rethink my future vision of localization:

TAUS

The Future Does Not Need Translators

“No, I don’t believe the translation profession is totally endangered, but it will change profoundly.”

Microsoft

Microsoft Neural Net Shows Deep Learning Can Get Way Deeper

“It shows that, in the years to come, companies like Microsoft will be able to use vast clusters of GPUs and other specialized chips to significantly improve not only image recognition but other AI services, including systems that recognize speech and even understand language as we humans naturally speak it.”

Microsoft Puts the Power of Its Artificial Intelligence Behind the Translator Hub

“Microsoft Translator is a direct implementation of Microsoft’s AI efforts in Machine Learning, with Deep Neural Networks and Long Short-Term Memory…”

Google

Deep Learning Is Coming to Google Translate

Jeff Dean, Google Senior Fellow, confirmed that his team has been working with the Google Translate team to “scale out experiments with translation based on deep learning.”

One more radical thought (linguists, please feel free to raise your eyebrows): Isn’t natural language merely a construct of data connected by linguistic syntax?
And data analysis currently being one of the biggest areas of research, this will inevitably impact linguistic research and localization as we know it.