Designers of machine translation tools still mostly rely on dictionaries to make a foreign language understandable. But now there is a new way: numbers.

Facebook researchers say rendering words into figures and exploiting mathematical similarities between languages is a promising avenue - even if a universal communicator a la Star Trek remains a distant dream.

Powerful automatic translation is a big priority for internet giants. Allowing as many people as possible worldwide to communicate is not just an altruistic goal, but also a good business. Facebook, Google and Microsoft as well as China's Baidu and others are constantly seeking to improve their translation tools.

AFP