The White House earmarked $1 billion in economic stimulus funds for American innovation programs, and issued a "Grand Challenge" in seven areas, one of which was to improve machine translation algorithms that automatically translate between languages. Look for machine translation to start using speech input and output, rather than just written text like today, within five years. R.C.J.
Traditional rule-based machine translation among languages has been merged with newer statistical learning methods to create hybrid machine translation algorithms that are more accurate than either method alone.
Text: http://www.smartertechnology.com/c/a/Technology-For-Change/Hybrid-Systems-Offer-Smarter-Machine-Translation-Among-Languages/
