The technological advancements never cease to amaze me! In particular the amazing improvements made to online automatic translation now common over the Internet. Today there are big names in this field such as Google, Babel-Fish, Systrans and Babylon.
Bu no matter how good they are at present, machine translation still present many pitfalls which should never be overlooked if you are translating documents or sensitive materials. Never trust a translation done by such products. They can work pretty well in giving you an “idea” of what the text is about, but accuracy is still miles away.
The case where machine translation is great is when you are trying to translate easy sentences like in everyday conversation. A friend of mine, who is a native English speaker chats with people from all over the world and he makes constant use of such services by translating back and forth from language to language. I once witnessed him chatting with a Spanish friend using Babylon’s online Spanish translation tool. I never did it myself, but the idea sounds great!
Bu no matter how good they are at present, machine translation still present many pitfalls which should never be overlooked if you are translating documents or sensitive materials. Never trust a translation done by such products. They can work pretty well in giving you an “idea” of what the text is about, but accuracy is still miles away.
The case where machine translation is great is when you are trying to translate easy sentences like in everyday conversation. A friend of mine, who is a native English speaker chats with people from all over the world and he makes constant use of such services by translating back and forth from language to language. I once witnessed him chatting with a Spanish friend using Babylon’s online Spanish translation tool. I never did it myself, but the idea sounds great!
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