Category Archives: Machine Translation


Radically inclusive machine translation gets mainstream press


March 7, 2019 ||

In a recent article, linguist Gretchen McCulloch of WIRED magazine echoes PanLex’s series on radically inclusive machine translation. She notes that only a small number of languages have well-supported machine translation. Most of the world’s 7,000 languages have little or no machine translation support, including some with tens of millions of speakers. However, that could […]


Enabling Radically Inclusive Machine Translation (part 3)


November 29, 2018 ||

In the first two posts in this series, we elaborated our belief that all people should be able to use their native language to exercise human rights and have access to opportunity. We showed that machine translation technology currently falls far short of this goal, but that there are realistic ways to make progress. In […]


Enabling Radically Inclusive Machine Translation (part 2)


October 25, 2018 ||

In the first post in this series, we discussed the importance of bringing machine translation to all of the world’s languages and some of the economic and technical challenges in doing so. In this post, we will explore in more detail the current status of technological support for machine translation in under-served languages. Along the […]


Enabling Radically Inclusive Machine Translation (part 1)


October 3, 2018 ||

Could you ask your doctor about your sprained ankle in French or Indonesian? Would you understand your bus schedule in Mandarin or Arabic? Could you take your biology exam in Hindi or Vietnamese? The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that everyone has the right to access health care, education, legal services, and technology. Nearly 3 […]