A world Connected

As technology grows the world continues to shrink and language barriers begin to decrease. This has been seen on Xiha Life’s homepage, a forum dedicated to connecting the world through online discussions. Xiha allows users to talk about family, vacations and friends all in their own language. They offer Google translation below an article and through this they have seen many people from all over the world comment and interact with each other in several different languages.

You might say, “I have tried translations online and they are a joke.” I would be in the same boat with you, especially after studying abroad. I used translations that were so horrible my host family would look at me with a very confused expression on their face. There is no telling what I actually said. But just since that semester, computer scientists have sought for a new way to train computers to understand and interpret correctly.

With computer intelligence, translations have and are becoming more reliable and this is evident on Xiha Life. It would be silly and a long process for computer scientists to teach a program the rules of language so instead, computer scientists locate massive corpora of online documents previously translated by humans explains Wired Magazine. The documents are then used to train cloud computers to recognize which words and phrases match up in languages across the boards.

“Machine translation isn’t good enough to translate books, but when you have someone you want to talk to, it really helps out a lot,” says Jani Penttinen, CEO of Xiha Life.

Google has become the best at training their cloud and are leading the way in translations that make sense. This method of training clouds to produce accurate translations will show even more as the Web grows and develops. It is strange to think that not long ago China seemed to be a distant place but today we can speak to someone in China as if they were our neighbor and carry on conversations without knowing their language at all.

In PR, this continues to offer new ways to effectively and efficiently communicate to new audiences and expand the outlets to which our information is distributed.

For more information pick up a copy of July 2010’s Wired Magazine.