Saturday, October 18, 2008

Do you use and trust machine translators?

Computational linguistics is a comprehensive area. As a brief background, machine translation (MT) is a sub-field of computational linguistics. It investigates the use of computer software to translate text or speech from one human language to another. MT performs simple substitution of words in a language for words in another. They use some advanced techniques such as corpus technique. These techniques help with:
-phrase recognition,
-better handling of differences in linguistic typology,
-translation of idioms, proverbs, metaphors, analogies and
-the isolation of anomalies.

Recently I met a co-networker from Germany with limited English skills. And my German is very limited too. His profile is in German and was looking for translators to help him. As a technologist, I used the Google's online translation applet for it and it really helped us to create the profile in a few minutes time with over 90% accuracy. I use translation software specifically for scientific documents written in other languages; at least the abstract. Even though they are not 100% accurate yet, I still find them useful. They are faster than finding a friend who can help in desperate times. They make good progress with new techniques and inventions. Considering the emergent technologies being tested, I believe we will have great translation programs soon.

I would like to obtain your views on this concept and available commercial tools:
1. Do you ever need to translate any documents from other languages? Which languages mainly?
2. Have you ever used; or do you use any machine translators (translation software)? If so, which ones?
3. Do you know what is the gap in this area?
4. What would you add to your wish list in this area?
5. How important are they for our business considering globalisation?

Any other comments are welcome.