> Automatic machine translation, and query expansion was supposed to make these inter-lingual barriers go away. But it feels like in many ways, the effort has d

> Automatic machine translation, and query expansion was supposed to make these inter-lingual barriers go away. But it feels like in many ways, the effort has died. Machine translation is still very much an active area of research. It sucked for many years as people hand-crafted more and more complicated systems; the big breakthroughs of the past ten years or so have come from realizing that, given very large (internet-scale) training datasets, you can apply some simple statistical methods and do much better than the previous hard-coded methods that couldn't exploit this wealth of data. There's been lots of tuning of the shallow statistical approach, but my understanding is that significant further progress will involve models that capture a deeper understanding of semantics while still maintaining the ability to be trained from large datasets. Identifying such models is hard and is an active area of research. Neural networks have been receiving a lot of study recently as one possible approach (see e.g. this demo http://104.131.78.120/ http://104.131.78.120/ from Yoshua Bengio's lab), but there are other avenues as well. Basically I don't think it's accurate to say "the effort has died". Research takes time, the technology is improving, and it's quite possible that within another ten or fifteen years we'll be able do to the sort of seamless, accurate translation across the Internet that you'd like to see. (translation between European languages, which are fundamentally similar in many ways, is already close to that point, but bridging the gap to Asian languages has been much harder...)