Tuesday 27 July 2004

All your translators are belong to us

Microsoft has launched a tool that helps non-native writers to write better English. "It is not, strictly speaking, a machine translation tool. It is more akin to the grammar checkers familiar to users of common word-processing programs—but enhanced to work with people not native in English. ... Using large numbers of Chinese and English texts, Zhou and his colleagues have learned what mistakes are common and what the writer probably intended. Using this quantitative approach—large sets of texts rather than complicated language rules—they also join the statistical trend from the last couple of years. It has proven far more effective than expected."
Advice for free: we hope you're not still using that sodding paper clip, Bill.

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