At Spanish NewsBites, we use human beings to do our word and phrase translations. There are now several very good automated translation programmes available, including the Windows Live Translator, Google Translate, Babylon and Lingro. The Windows Live Translator site tells us:
"Language translation is extremely difficult, as the meaning of words and phrases often depends on the context and specialized knowledge of the domain area or culture. Sentence structures and grammatical rules vary significantly between two languages, which adds to the complexity of the translation challenge. Currently, it still requires human skills to translate sentences without errors. The quality of today's most advanced translation software is well below the accuracy and fluency of a professional translator, and many sentences are simply not understandable. Researchers are continuously working on improvements, but it may be many years before high quality translation can be consistently offered by a computer."
We couldn't have put it better ourselves. The automated translators hit the bullseye some of the time. But they still struggle in too many areas, as a few minutes spent playing with any of the above will quickly show. One of them, for example, supplies you with a list of possible translations, but what you need is one translation - the right one. Many words simply aren't in their databases. But the biggest problem, of course, is context.
What we're aiming for at SNB is to hit that contextual translation bullseye all the time. Machines are good, but humans are even better.
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