IN “STAR TREK” it was a hand-held Universal Translator; in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” it was the Babel Fish popped conveniently into the ear. In science fiction, the meeting of distant ...

I work at a large international organization translating speeches from French, Spanish, and Russian. When a rumor began spreading in my office that our jobs were to be “supplemented” by computer ...

In a meeting at Google in 2004, the discussion turned to an e-mail message the company had received from a fan in South Korea. Sergey Brin, a Google founder, ran the message through an automatic ...

Literary translators have long used computers for basic assistance, for example in the form of online dictionaries and corpora, but they have also long been resistant to the idea that machine ...

One of the most frequently-used phrases at (virtual) business conferences these days is “the future of work.” It’s increasingly clear that artificial intelligence and other new technologies will bring ...

In the 23rd century, people will use a gizmo that looks suspiciously like a flashlight to communicate with alien species. That’s in the world of “Star Trek.” In the here and now, a small Marina del ...