Translation among different languages used to be solely dependent on human brains. But with its self-learning ability, artificial intelligence has enabled machine translation at scale and at better precision a reality. An AI-powered translation service developed by Netease Sight is changing the landscape of video and film translation here in China. The service is smart enough to work on itself to do subtitles for videos and films but human polishing is still needed. 

It is still a problem planning your overseas vacation when you can’t speak native languages. iFlytek, a company that specifies in voice recognition and artificial intelligence R&D, has launched its pocket translator, a device that can help you to communicate between Chinese and 33 foreign languages. The company is working to lead the industry in common sense reasoning, knowledge mapping, machine reading and image recognition to sharpen its edge in AI translation. 

The demand for machine translation is out there and AI can produce better translations faster than before, but it will take a long time to get breakthrough towards perfect translation. The rhetoric that AI translation will make human translators obsolete is definitely too fancy to be true.