Anchor: Artificial Intelligence in translating foreign languages is advancing at a rapid pace with smartphone apps that now offer simultaneous interpretation. On Tuesday a competition was held where man was pitted against machine to compare their translation capabilities.
Here is our Park Jong-hong.
 
Report: Human translators and AI translating programs were given several paragraphs to translate from Korean to English and vice versa.
 
Human translators were given 50 minutes to complete the task comprised of both literary and non-literary works. The machines finished the job almost instantaneously.

Pitted against one another were three programs, Naver’s Papago, Google Translate and Systran and four people with more than five years of translating experience.
 
The unique competition on Tuesday was hosted by the International Interpretation and Translation Association, Sejong University and Sejong Cyber University.
 
Despite taking longer, the humans far outweighed the AI programs in terms of quality, scoring an average of 82 against the computers' 33.
 
Many translators and AI experts at the venue, however, acknowledged that AI has come a long way in terms of translation speed and quality.
 
[Sound bite: Sung Chang-kwon - professional translator (Korean)]
“It was quite shocking. Looking at the translated material by AI, it was pretty similar to the human translations.”
 
[Sound bite: Kim Yoo-suk, Senior Director of an AI company (Korean)]
 “There is now a platform where the program eliminates mistakes on its own based on a database. So it has improved a lot from the past.”
 
Many translation experts say in the case of translating Japanese, the gap has narrowed considerably.
 
Some say the translations of 'The Great Gatsby' by Japan’s Haruki Murakami and Google Translate were not so much different.
 
Industry experts say that it will be about three years before AI is capable of translating Korean to a level on par with that of professional translators.
Park Jong-hong KBS World Radio News.