Facebook’s translations are now powered completely by AI



The benefits are pretty clear. Compare these two examples from Facebook of a Turkish-to-English translation. The top one comes from the old phrase-based system, and the bottom one from the new system. You can see how taking into account the full context of the sentence produces a more accurate result.


When a word in a sentence doesn’t have a direct corresponding translation in a target language, the neural system will generate a placeholder for the unknown word. A translation of that word is searched for in a sort of in-house dictionary built from Facebook’s training data, and the unknown word is replaced. That allows abbreviations like “tmrw” to be translated into their intended meaning — “tomorrow.”

“Neural networks open up many future development paths related to adding further context, such as a photo accompanying the text of a post, to create better translations,” the company said. “We are also starting to explore multilingual models that can translate many different language directions.”


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