"Machine translation is fine - it'll give you the bulk of what it means". Or so people keep telling me! Personally, I'm a little wary. And here's a lovely example of why I am cautious. This machine translation of an Italian report of a bike race is, um.... interesting.
I start form the perspective of knowing a bit about cycle racing, and being able to take a semi-intelligent guess at how things may have been expressed in the Italian. But even so, it left me confused!
"The flown one has been launch to the 300 meters from the arrival banner."
Yer wot?
I start form the perspective of knowing a bit about cycle racing, and being able to take a semi-intelligent guess at how things may have been expressed in the Italian. But even so, it left me confused!
"The flown one has been launch to the 300 meters from the arrival banner."
Yer wot?
posted by Nick at 11:25 PM
3 Comments:
Hi Nick,
Do not believe what people tell you. Believe the evidence.
According to the Localization Industry Standards Association (www.lisa.org/Best-Practic.467.0.htm), "today, more words are translated per year using MT than are translated by human translators, and the demand continues to grow."
Machine translation is not as good as translation by people. However, if text is optimised for machine translation, machine translation gives good results. For a small evaluation of the quality of machine translation, see http://www.international-english.co.uk/mt-evaluation.html.
You make a fair comment, Mike - Machine translation has indeed got a lot better over the years.
And yes, if the source text is properly optimised ahead of being processed by machine translation, then it is possible to gain acceptable results.
But my real point here is that we can't simply throw our marketing literature at a machine translation system and expect it to come out in another language as something that makes a positive impression on our potential clients.
As you say, we must go with the evidence - which is exactly why I posted the link to the report of the bike race in Italy, so people (and most of my blog readers are English native speakers) can see, in their own language, how well or badly the end results might read in the target language.
Yes, I agree with you Nick. Machine translation is not suitable for the translation of marketing literature.
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