Translation with Vasco Pedro

Translation is a classic problem in computer science. How do you translate a sentence from one human language into another? This seems like a problem that computers are well-suited to solve. Languages follow well-defined rules, we have lots of sample data to train our machine learning models.

And yet, the problem has not been solved–largely because languages don’t always follow rules. We have idioms and subtle contextual clues that make it hard to provide a computer with hard and fast rules for translation.

Unbabel is a company whose solution to translation puts a human in the loop to correct the error-prone translations that computers often make. In this episode, Vasco Pedro joins the show to explain Unbabel’s approach to translation, its technology stack, and the business applications for translation.