...to try it with Proust—although I fear the day is not far off when the bean counters at some parsimonious publishers will decide to save a nickel a copy by employing these technologies in lieu of live translators. Shortly after this happens, the bean counters will themselves be replaced by automated subroutines.

You wouldn't want to rely on the existing state of the art in realms in which nuance is critical, such as poetry or diplomacy, but for routine business correspondence, say, it might prove quite adequate. And lord knows, for instruction manuals Google Translate could scarcely do worse* than Asian tech writers.

Some while back I read a piece, possibly at the Atlantic website, in which the author related chatting up Brin or Page at some event years ago, fairly early on in Google's march to world domination, and being told that the search engine was preliminary to the ultimate project: "We're building an AI." I remain persuaded that we are going to see some jaw-dropping advances in the field over the next five years, and also that with every advance the goalposts will be moved further into the parking lot.

cordially,

*I jest. The problem with, say, the multilingual operating instructions that come with a modern television set lies far deeper than the clumsy handling of a foreign tongue.

The sense of that aphorism, of course, was willfully misconstrued at the time by people who knew better, and the spurious sense attributed to the utterance eagerly lapped up by a populace primed to believe the worst of a reformist on whom the domestic press had draped the mantle of Stalin. It is a great shame that K's handlers couldn't have dismissed it as "locker room talk."

(and who among us has not had occasion to feel, in President Carter's immortal [translated] words, "great lust for the Polish people?" Why I remember this one girl...but I digress.)

cordially,