Statistics-based language-translation technology is allowing scientists to crack scores of languages in a fraction of the time, and at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods.

Johns Hopkins computer scientists hope to have working translation systems for as many as 100 languages within five years.

Researchers have benefited from a much faster means of evaluating the outcome of translation experiments: the Bleu Metric computerized technique developed by IBM compares machine translations with a “gold standard” based on human translations.

Instead of waiting for human beings to assign a score to the quality of a machine translation, the Bleu Metric does so almost instantly through a statistical comparison.

This provides scientists with a fast, objective measurement that they can use to note improvement and saves them from having to review every unsuccessful experiment.