Following the activation of Google Translate’s neural network in 2016, researchers realised that the system was capable of translating not merely between languages, but across them; that is, it could translate directly between two languages it had never seen explicitly compared. For example, a network trained on Japanese–English and English–Korean examples is capable of generating Japanese–Korean translations without ever passing through English.33 This is called ‘zero-shot’ translation, and what it implies is the existence of an ‘interlingual’ representation: an internal metalanguage composed
...more
