Why moconnor's observation matters, based on my personal experience learning French:
- It's relatively easy to learn enough French to carry on a slow, clearly-enunciated conversation with a highly-cooperative speaker in a quiet room. Call it 350 hours of study, or B1 on the CEFRL scale: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_Re...
- If you want to watch the French dub of [i]The Game of Thrones[/i] in a noisy room, and actually follow the plot twists, it's whole different game. Call it 1,000 to 2,000 hours of study and exposure, perhaps more for some people. If you want to listen to standup comedy, it's usually even worse.
In other words, it's surprisingly easy to establish basic communication, but you can break your heart trying to get really good.
Going by this experience, and by lots of experiments with Google Translate, I would predict that machine translation will suffer from similar challenges: It will be easy to get the point across if everybody cooperates and speaks clearly. But it will be a long time before you can speak idiomatically and casually, at full speed, and pretend the translation system isn't there.
- It's relatively easy to learn enough French to carry on a slow, clearly-enunciated conversation with a highly-cooperative speaker in a quiet room. Call it 350 hours of study, or B1 on the CEFRL scale: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_Re...
- If you want to watch the French dub of [i]The Game of Thrones[/i] in a noisy room, and actually follow the plot twists, it's whole different game. Call it 1,000 to 2,000 hours of study and exposure, perhaps more for some people. If you want to listen to standup comedy, it's usually even worse.
In other words, it's surprisingly easy to establish basic communication, but you can break your heart trying to get really good.
Going by this experience, and by lots of experiments with Google Translate, I would predict that machine translation will suffer from similar challenges: It will be easy to get the point across if everybody cooperates and speaks clearly. But it will be a long time before you can speak idiomatically and casually, at full speed, and pretend the translation system isn't there.