Machine translation and international English
Machine translation (MT) is the automatic translation of text using only software without the help of a human translator. An alternative name for machine translation is automated translation.
Many people can give examples of humorous machine translations, or machine translations that have no meaning. Therefore, many people think that machine translation never gives good results. However, according to the Localization Industry Standards Association (www.lisa.org/Best-Practic.467.0.html), "today, more words are translated per year using MT than are translated by human translators, and the demand continues to grow."
Usually, the problem of bad translation is because the source text is not clear in a way that a machine can analyse. International English is written in a way that a machine can analyse. Therefore, machine translation gives good results with international English.
If you can read a language other than English, you can confirm that machine translation gives good results. Use the Google Translate option that is on this website, or use other free machine translation software.
To evaluate the quality of machine translation, do not translate from English to a different language, and then translate back to English. A correct translation back to English does not confirm that the first translation is correct. For example, Google translates the English sentence 'The event came out of the blue' to the Italian sentence 'L'evento รจ venuto fuori dalla blu.' Although the translation has no meaning in Italian, the sentence is translated back to English correctly. (This test was done on 2008-12-12.)
Machine translation software
The following list shows some popular free machine translation software:
- Babylon (http://translation.babylon.com)
- Google Translate (www.google.co.uk/language_tools?hl=en)
- KWIK Translator from Lucy Software (www.lucysoftware.com)
- SDL (www.freetranslation.com)
- SYSTRANet (www.systranet.com)
- Windows Live Translator (www.microsofttranslator.com)
- WordLingo (www.worldlingo.com/en/products_services/worldlingo_translator.html)
To improve the quality of machine translation, use software that lets you specify how particular terms are translated. The following list shows some commercial suppliers:
- Language Engineering Company, LLC (LEC) (www.lec.com)
- Language Weaver (www.languageweaver.com/page/view/857/854/)
- Lucy Software (www.lucysoftware.com)
- SYSTRAN (www.systran.co.uk/translation-products/server/systran-enterprise-server/)