Blog 4: Google Translate's Rival

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My Google alerts this week were fun articles about how you can make Google translate sound like an old car starting to the reviews of the latest Pixel earbuds. I wasn't sure how I could write an informative Blog post about those topics, so I went back through my alerts. As I scanned them I realized this would Baidu kept recurring day after day! So I decided to look into what exactly all the hype was about. 

News to me, Baidu is essentially Google's Search Engine competitor but created in China. So what does Baidu have to do with ESL or language? Well, just like Google has developed some translation software, so has Baidu! The "hype" or popular topic this week is the fact that Baidu claims to have simultaneous instant translation software. I wrote in a previous post about how Google has come out with an augmented reality addition to their Google translate software and Baidu's tool is very similar. Baidu is using artificial intelligence which is what allows for the "instant" translation. 

Where Baidu lacks is the number of languages it can translate. From what the article shares it can only translate Chinese to English and vice versa as well as some German. The reason behind this is that you need lots and lots of data collection to build these instant translations. 

One point in the article that I thought was interesting is that they ended with saying that even though they are making these technological advancements with translation, they do not think or want these tools to ever replace human translators and they feel there is a definite need for them in high stake situations. 

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