New Delhi, Aug. 18 -- Imagine asking two students to learn translation. One receives a library filled with books, subtitles, news reports and millions of professionally translated sentences. The other receives a dictionary, a handful of documents and fragments gathered from different sources.

The difference is not intelligence. It is opportunity.

Artificial intelligence faces a similar imbalance. Translation has improved rapidly for languages richly represented online, but far less evenly for those with little digitised text or bilingual material. A peer-reviewed survey of low-resource machine translation notes that roughly 7,000 languages are spoken worldwide, yet almost all language pairs lack significant training resources.

These la...