What happens when you combine A.I. with human intelligence? One answer is that you get Unbabel, a machine translation service on a mission to solve one of humanity’s most vexing challenges: language barriers. At Unbabel, the ultimate goal is to be able  to communicate with anyone, anywhere in the world regardless of their native language. But to achieve that lofty goal we need data, we need translators and we need them to work together. João Graca is the Co-founder and CTO of Unbabel and on this episode of IT Visionaries, he discusses how his company is working to bring those two sides together to get closer to a future when we can rely on machine translation.

Key Takeaways

• A Long Way to Go: While there has been a lot of progress with machine translation, there still is a long way to go. Translation services, like Google Translate, have the ability to comprehend words and sentences, but understanding full phrases and rare words remains a struggle. Unbabel works in real-time with machine translation and in-house translators to efficiently translate emails and marketing materials
• We Need Data and Need it Now: One of the biggest challenges when it comes to machine translation is the lack of data, especially in uncommon languages. Data from popular languages are used to help decipher sentences and phrases. When we don’t constantly have an influx of data, that challenge becomes greater.
• You Just Don’t Understand: if we don’t utilize both data and translators to grow machine translation, the intelligence will continue to be stagnant. The biggest issue right now is companies hiring in-house translators, which is not efficient, doesn’t increase the amount of open source data, and is incredibly expensive for companies.

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