The technology behind machine translation is being
constantly developed and improved. Nowadays many people have translated something
automatically. The best things about machine translators are wide availability
and fast translation. There are many kinds of translators available in the
Internet. Some of those can be purchased and some are totally free. Likewise
those tools differ in supported file formats and technical features. Without
too much generalization, it can be said that in some cases the price indicates
the versatility of the tool.
One of the latest machine translator innovations are
translator gadgets, which are desktop gadgets for PC desktops. Translator
gadgets are usually very simple tools to use: After you have downloaded the
gadget you can start using it. First select the language of the original
language and the target language. Then just start typing or just copy and paste
pieces of text from a document or from the Internet. These gadgets will
automatically write the text in the other language for you.
This technology can be very useful because machine
translator produces quality which is of "good enough". However it is
reasonable to highlight that the quality of automatically produced text cannot
yet reach the quality level of a professional human translator. As mentioned,
the risk in using machine translation is commonly related to the quality. Most
of the time the quality is good but sometimes machine translators can make
mistakes when choosing between words that seems to be synonyms. It is mission
impossible to know which translations are mistaken if you don't speak that
language yourself.
Today's technology enables new innovations in the area of
machine translation quality. While more and more information about languages
are collected to translation memories, the quality itself is improving. However
there is still a lot to do if the target is the quality of a professional human
translation. Another way to improve the quality is to perform automatic
translation quality checking. This means that one will receive an estimation of
how good the translation is. Technically speaking these estimations are usually
based on some kind of comparison and match calculation because that is
something a computer can do easily.
The way how the quality estimation is presented to the user
can vary a lot. For example Translator Gadget use colour
codes. Green color means that the translation is probably good, yellow will
instruct you to be cautious and red color indicates that you should have a
professional human translator to check the translation before using it in
public. Also percentages or numbers or other coding methods can be used. No
matter how the estimation is presented, it is still important to keep in mind
that estimation is based on technology which is possible for a computer; it is
an estimation and not the ultimate truth. Even people can have different
opinions about the writing and spelling rules!
The key in machine translation is to know whether you can
trust that the translation is good or not. This has been a problem which has
led to the slightly negative reputation over the automatic, computer aided
translators. There have been too many examples of automatically translated
texts which have been used publicly without any proofreading. The fear of
making mistakes has impacted the public attitude towards this technology.
Automatic quality estimation is still being developed but already it is trying
to fade this fear away by giving an estimation of the translation quality.
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