[edit: see ~gleinstein's sibling comment – it's what i was trying to say, but articulated much better] > I’ll equate this to being critical of any early techno

[edit: see ~gleinstein's sibling comment – it's what i was trying to say, but articulated much better] > I’ll equate this to being critical of any early technology as if no further development will happen. i read it as saying that the current approach to translation, while a useful approximation, can't ever really work, not because it's "early in its development", but because it's fundamentally not enough – the software needs some actual "understanding of what is being said" to accurately translate. from TFA: > The practical utility of Google Translate and similar technologies is undeniable, and probably it’s a good thing overall, but there is still something deeply lacking in the approach, which is conveyed by a single word: understanding. Machine translation has never focused on understanding language. Instead, the field has always tried to “decode”—to get away without worrying about what understanding and meaning are. [after showing some instances where Translate fails:] > We humans know all sorts of things about couples, houses, personal possessions, pride, rivalry, jealousy, privacy, and many other intangibles that lead to such quirks as a married couple having towels embroidered “his” and “hers.” Google Translate isn’t familiar with such situations. Google Translate isn’t familiar with situations, period. It’s familiar solely with strings composed of words composed of letters. It’s all about ultrarapid processing of pieces of text, not about thinking or imagining or remembering or understanding. It doesn’t even know that words stand for things. > Let me hasten to say that a computer program certainly could, in principle, know what language is for, and could have ideas and memories and experiences, and could put them to use, but that’s not what Google Translate was designed to do.