How far are we from universal translation, the “holy grail” of machine translation (MT), where everyone in the world can understand every language in real time? We sat down with Philipp Koehn, a Meta AI research scientist, author of Statistical Machine Translation and Neural Machine Translation, and one of the inventors of the modern method of phrase-based MT. He talks about the latest advances in MT, the newest open challenges for the field, and promising directions on the path toward universal translation.
