A major mystery behind Microsoft's 'brain-like' speech-to-speech translator

The more languages it learns, the better it becomes at the ones it learned first, but no one knows why
By Tim Greene, Network World
 
Speech-to-speech translation technology Microsoft is prepping for Skype has an unexplained capability: the more languages it learns, the better it becomes at the languages it learned first.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella introduced Skype Translate at the Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., saying that it could translate between spoken languages, but he had no explanation for why its facility with languages learned early-on get a turbo boost from learning more.
 
“Say you teach it English, it learns English,” Nadella says. “Then you teach it Mandarin, it learns Mandarin but it becomes better at English. And then you teach it Spanish, it’ll get good at Spanish but it gets great at both Mandarin and English, and quite frankly none of us know exactly why. It’s brain-like in the sense of its capability to learn. It’s magical.”
 
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