Machine Translation Pitfalls
No matter how sophisticated or expensive a translation program may be, it has major limitations.
A software package can only do what it is programmed to do. Translation programs are fine for single word translation, but they cannot perform contextual translation. A software translation program matches "word to word". It does not recognize the different meanings that a word may have and the context. This can be detrimental to your business image. Regardless of the manufacturer's claims, no software package can deal with the constantly changing nature of a living language. Legal, scientific and specialized phrases and terms are a particularly problematic area for translation programs, but they also often have difficulty with simple homonyms and synonyms.
You've probably received dozens of advertisements for software packages that claim to meet every imaginable translation need, from literal translation through to complex legal contracts. These ads often include such enticing statements as:
* Automatic complete text translation *
* Translating without linguistic knowledge *
* The complete text translator *
*Save money! A translation program will do all translations for you.*
Well, we continually test various translation programs to see just how accurate they are. Online translation services (such as the free service provided at Alta Vista) were included in the tests. Prices ranged from free to very expensive, but all tested programs provided the same results. None of the programs yielded accurate contextual translation. In other words, the meaning of the original passage was lost in the translation.
Machine translations can assist in translating simple texts for personal use, where the accuracy is not important. They are not suitable for complex texts or where the message of the text matters.
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