Here is the Poll result (Machine Translation, an experiment – a poll). I had 26 votes and only 2 was native English speakers. I would like to have some more of them… Interesting is that the majority was so wrong!
The only article where I used Machine Translation is humanoids – the next generation. I don’t know if this means that I write better or worse than the Machine Translator does! It certainly means that this text was different from the others but the majority misconstrued the text to be mine!
I had some very funny translations. For instance when the Swedish sentence was:
“Visa gästerna till bordet, erbjuda kaffe och plocka bort efter dem”
which in English should be something like “Show the guests to the table, offering coffee and clean up after them”
The automatic translation said: “Show guests to the table, offering coffee and eliminate them”
The Terminator or what?
Machine Translation is not perfect in any way. If I didn’t change the text it would be very obvious which one that was Machine Translated. When will we have machine translations where you can not see if it is machine translated or not? My guess is that we will see an increase in quality during the coming years.
Quote from one of the comments to me previous blog post machine translation, an experiment: “I think that quality has two parts: fluency and accuracy. If the purpose of machine translation is to give information to people in their language, accuracy is more important than fluency. If a machine translation is correct, the fluency of the translation does not matter. For a small evaluation of the accuracy and the fluency of machine translation, see http://www.international-english.co.uk/mt-evaluation.html“, Mike Unwalla.
I couldn’t agree more. The accuracy will increasingly be very good within the 5-10 years to come, due to the new statistical techniques mentioned in the same blog post above. Fluency is a completely different matter. Translating a poem can normally not be correct because there is no correct translation. It can be more or less fluent and it can express the same message more or less similar to the original text. We are talking of maybe 15-20 years before computers will even be near human translators.
Computer aided translations started 1954 and at that time they believed that within a few years, machine translation would be solved.
History shows that we should never underestimate the problems with Machine Translation!
Image by adriaan bloem via Flickr
