Experts believe that machine translation good enough to replace advanced human translators will be widespread within five to 10 years, as language-processing technology has seen many breakthroughs in recent years, Xinhuanet.com reported on May 22.

据新华网5月22日报道，由于近年来语言处理技术取得了多项突破，专家们相信，足以取代资深译员的机器翻译将在五至十年内普及。

Zhou Ming, standing¹ deputy dean of Microsoft Research Asia, made the statement in his keynote speech at the 2017 Global Artificial Intelligence Technology Conference, held in Beijing on May 22.

5月22日，微软亚洲研究院常务副院长周明在于北京举行的2017全球人工智能技术大会上发表的主旨演讲中这样说道。

Machine translation currently faces challenges that prevent it from reaching the standards of professional translation, Zhou noted².

周明指出，当前，机器翻译面临着各种挑战，这使得其无法达到专业翻译的标准。

However, he also pointed³ out that several technology companies are now focusing on machine translation, and have already made great progress.

不过他也指出，现在好几家技术公司正在主攻机器翻译，且已取得很大进展。

Google released its translation system in September 2016, based on recurrent neural⁴ networks.

2016年9月，谷歌公司发布了自己基于递归神经网络的翻译系统。

In addition, the artificial intelligence team at Facebook claimed to have achieved the highest accuracy yet in machine translation by using brand new neural network technology, with a translating speed nine times that of Google.

此外，脸书的人工智能团队宣称，通过使用新型神经网络技术，已经实现了迄今最为准确的机器翻译，翻译速度为谷歌的九倍。

Apart from translation, Zhou speculated that language-processing technology, integrated with other artificial intelligence, could be applied⁵ in many fields including education, medicine and driverless cars in the near future.

周明预测，除了翻译，语言处理技术和其它人工智能，在未来还可应用于包括教育、药物和无人驾驶在内的很多领域。