Right now, China is preparing for next month’s once-in-a-decade special Communist Party Congress, which will play a major role in selecting the country’s next generation of leaders. In what’s beginning to look like a concerted (and long-overdue) effort to raise the country’s profile in the British consciousness, the BBC has been producing a veritable torrent of highly informative pieces about China recently. If you’re a Radio 4 listener, you’ll quite likely have heard a number of these in broadcast form read more

I recently read that a noted futurist (Ray Kurzweil) reckoned that machine translation will catch up with human translation in about 2029.

So, does that mean that in eighteen years all human translators will become redundant? Quite frankly, I find it hard to imagine. Certainly, at the moment, with the best will in the world, machine translation generally requires a large overhaul by a human editor to end up looking like a natural specimen of the target language.

Of course, the read more