In my daily life, I have to deal with only two languages, french and english. And i pretty much masterized both. But occasionally, when I'm doing some research for instance, I'm intrigued by a high ranking web page wriiten in japanese or in russian. And I don't understand these languages.
So, what to do? Ignore a potentially interesting source of relevant information? Or use a Web translating service?
Andy Reinhardt had the same problem as I have. What he found can be summarized by this: Web translators work for a word or two. But beyond that, hire a human.
He tried a service named WorldLingo. Here is is what he says about it and online translation sites in general.
First, you absolutely cannot count on them for important business communications. Even the best make frequent errors that can render their results nearly incomprehensible -- and potentially catastrophic. For instance, the previous sentence, sent on a round trip through Worldlingo, where I converted it from English to Portuguese and back again, came out as: "Exactly better they make the frequent errors that relieve its results almost incomprehensible--and catastrophic potential." Worldlingo did far better with French and German, returning almost perfect translations.
The worst Web translating service he found so far was Translation Experts, from InterTran.
The site has a pretty interface decked out with colorful flags and offers languages not found elsewhere, such as Polish and Turkish. But four out of five times I tried to reach it, I was turned away by a message that was both boastful and cryptic: "Too many translation requests by millions of users." [Plus cryptic messages!] Ugh.
Here is BusinessWeek's conclusion.
The sad truth is that machine translation still isn't ready for prime time. It's terrific for converting individual words and does provide the gist of foreign language texts and Web sites. So try it. Just don't trust it for business.
Source: Andy Reinhardt, BusinessWeek Magazine, July 22, 2002 Issue
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