The elusive goal of machine translation.

“The Chronicles of Narnia” doesn’t come near the poetic vision of “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, and it doesn’t have the dark undercurrents that makes the “Harry Potter” series endlessly fascinating. This passage illustrates that machine translation, or MT, as it is known, remains one of the more challenged subdisciplines of the blighted field of artificial intelligence. A proper name or a few well-crafted phrases suffice to throw the software off track. In the past few years, though, a new research approach has fueled a revival for machine translation: brute-force computing methods— which gauge the probability that a word or phrase in one language matches that in another—are at last bringing MT closer to human performance, in the estimation of developers of this software.