“…translators will talk for ever about the difficulty of the job. They have bad consciences. They know the original too well and live with a constant measure of their failure.” —David Constantine

“Since storage is almost free, you can kind of keep everything now. There’s this notion of using large amounts of data to do things previously done by clever algorithms—for example, language translation. … The more data you have, the better the rules get.” —Kunle Olukotun

“When Google Translate generates a translation, it looks for patterns in hundreds of millions of documents to help decide on the best translation for you. By detecting patterns in documents that have already been translated by human translators, Google Translate can make intelligent guesses as to what an appropriate translation should be. This process of seeking patterns in large amounts of text is called “statistical machine translation”. Since the translations are generated by machines, not all translation will be perfect. The more human-translated documents that Google Translate can analyse in a specific language, the better the translation quality will be. This is why translation accuracy will sometimes vary across languages.” — Google Translate