Microsoft announced today that its researchers have developed an AI machine translation system that can translate with the same accuracy as a human from Chinese to English. 

To validate the results, the researchers used an industry standard test set of news stories (newstest2017) to compare human and machine translation results. 

To further ensure accuracy of the evaluation, the team also hired bilingual human evaluators who compared the results against a different set of human-produced translations.        

Read more about this translation breakthrough on the Microsoft Research blog, and test (a portion) of this new system at translate.ai.  

For more in-depth information about the neural machine translation technologies developed for this breakthrough, read the newly published research paper.