How well does machine translation work?
This is my field so let me bark in. > Results vary from the impressive (usually with carefully prepared > text, as in software suppliers’ demos) Technical material with no ellipses usually gives results close to perfect. Funny thing, the more technical, and the longer the sentences are, the better result as long as the original sentence had a meaning. > to the unintelligible. Spoken English/Japanese is still close to impossible to translate. But, honestly, many times the problems are with the human, not with the machine. I met a project in Denmark where they tried to translate patents by machine and of course, the results were hopeless. However, when I saw the original English text, I could not believe what I saw: one sentence, more than half a page long, without a predicate. I seriously doubt that any human would have done much better on that. After breaking the text into about six sentences and providing the missing predicates, the result was practically perfect. I mean, perfect. > R
