Will translation software sound the death knell for interpreters?

"It earned the honor for its technological merit and social significance," Wang Haifeng, vice-president of Baidu, said.
"The Baidu Translate App can recognize text, voices and even pictures. For example,travellers can take a photo of the menu and the app will read the menu and do thetranslation."
Wang has led the research team for Baidu Translate over the past six years. He said thesoftware can now translate 27 languages, currently has 500 million users worldwide andresponds to over 100 million translation requirements every day, China Daily reports.
It is often used by online retailers to translate product descriptions, saving them the cost ofhiring translators.
And it is expanding quickly, taking them only about 11 days to launch a new language, Wangsaid.
"We collect bilingual data on the Internet, the computer will then study the data automaticallyand form translation models accordingly," he said.
But the rapid development of machine translations has raised concerns that translating jobsmay soon be endangered and whether learning a second language will soon be useless.
Zou Tingfang, an interpreter involved in legal work, believes automated translations areunlikely to beat translators in the foreseeable future.
"I use software when doing translations, but I never use it when interpreting. Machines stillhave many limits," she said. "Language, especially when spoken, is lively and dynamic.Machines cannot handle changes as adequately as human beings. For example, wheninterpreting, one word can have more than ten meanings depending on the occasion.Machines still cannot precisely distinguish different contexts."
But automated translations can be accurate for translating languages with fixed context, suchas billboards, online games or contracts, she said.
Zhou Min, an English instructor at Nanchang University in Jiangxi province, said, "I am afrequent user of machine translations. The convenience is undeniable, but a machine is amachine. It still cannot respond to variations adequately, since it lacks the flexibility of ahuman brain."
Wang Haifeng believes machine and human translators can complement each other. "Atranslation system can master dozens of languages and jargon in different fields, but goodtranslators can better convey the exquisite beauty of language," he said.
When analyzing user demand, Wang found the app's visitors rose sharply at the weekend. "We believe it is because many students are using our product as an aid when doinghomework," he said.
This trend has Yao Ying, a teacher at the Shanghai New Oriental language school, a littleworried.
"Many of the students are using translation software. Machine translation has offered them ashortcut, but I am not sure whether it will do any good to their study considering their lack ofaccuracy."
"It can only supplement, not substitute, traditional book learning," she said.
Zhou Min believes that machine translation is also changing people's attitudes towardslanguage learning, but the enthusiasm of learning will not fade in the era of machinetranslations.
"For people who need to learn a certain language for occasional use, they will not have tostudy the language since an app can solve the problem. While for those who are learninglanguages as a major or planning a long-term stay in a foreign country, machine translationcan help them learn more efficiently," she said.
Zou said even if machine translations become so advanced that they can meet all translationneeds in the future, people would still want to gain a working knowledge of differentlanguages.
"People are born with the desire to express and communicate," she said. "There will alwaysbe a need of direct and in-depth communication."