This huge body of information was not cheap to generate, but once it’s digitized it’s very cheap to replicate, chop up, and share widely and repeatedly. This is exactly what a service like Google Translate does. When it gets an English sentence and a request for its German equivalent, it essentially scans all the documents it knows about in both English and German, looking for a close match (or a few fragments that add up to a close match), then returns the corresponding German text. Today’s most advanced automatic translation services, then, are not the result of any recent insight about how
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