Clive Thompson writes at Wired about how automatic translation software has improved to the point that there may be no need for a “Globish” language (aka English). Fascinating stuff.

How have the machines become so adept? Mostly by using new “statistical” techniques. Instead of trying to teach a program the rules of language, computer scientists locate massive corpora of online documents previously translated by humans — say, UN proceedings, which are routinely available in six different languages, or bilingual newspapers. Then they train cloud computers to recognize which words and phrases match up across tongues.

That’s why Google is leading the pack: It’s best at finding oodles of documents to train its cloud. This method also means that the more the Web grows, the better our multilingual machines will get.

The geopolitical implications are profound. For years, pundits have wondered which language will eventually dominate. Will English remain the lingua franca? Will Mandarin ascend?

But maybe it’s no longer a competition. Machine translation could be good enough to obviate the need for a primary global language.