Yes, you read that correctly...we will be writing an English to French translator. The pre-machine learning world might have approached this with a series of parsers and rules on how to translate words and phrases to others, but our approach will be far more elegant, generalizable, and quick. We will just use examples, many examples, to train our translator.
The game here will be finding a dataset with enough English sentences translated into French (actually, it will work in any language). Translated essays and news articles will not be as helpful as we won't necessarily be able to place specific sentences from one language to another side by side. So, we will need to be more creative. Fortunately, organizations such as the United Nations often need to do exactly this—they need to do line by line translations to meet the needs of their diverse constituencies...