Myths of Machine Translation

Machine translation has many limitations and I am not a big proponent of complete machine translation but as these systems become more sophisticated, I believe that they do have a place in the translation process.  I read a great article in tcworld on dispelling the myths and bad rap for machine translation. 

Ultimately, most of us have used the free services out there on the net and that is not a true representation of many of the machine translation tools available today.

The free services do not allow users to select a subject field or provide user terminology, they can’t set stylistic preferences or translation parameters other than the specification of desired language pair and the drop in of source text.  Not much to go by.  No wonder there are such problems. Often times what is produced is a word-for-word translation.

The proprietary commercialized machine translation services are usually only utilized in larger organizations.  These systems have cost millions of dollars in research and development. 

Recent facts that dispel some of these myths:

• Machine translation can improve the productivity ands consistency of human translators
• Machine translation enables more translation of materials that would ordinarily not have been translated due to lowered costs and turn around time
• There are many machine translation programs/technologies that are capable of producing translation results in the right environments like rules based machine translation, statistical machine translation and direct machine translation. 
• There are many affordable and user-friendly machine translation packages available for even the smallest of businesses and freelancers.

Machine translation is still a very controversial issue and as a translation agency we will need to utilize and work with this new technology to provide the best value to our customers.  I think there will always be a role for the those with linguistic backgrounds as these systems are meant to be used with human translators.  However, I think in the near future there may be a higher adoption rate of machine translation as more and more technology and sophistication  and solutions are provided to increase efficiency.