The accuracy of machine-translated documents has been a much-debated topic in the language industry—a debate that intensifies as machine translation (MT) becomes more prevalent in Internet applications.

MT technology has been slowly gaining prominence since 1954, when Georgetown University undertook a project designed to translate Russian into English. Since that time, Harvard University, the National Academy of Sciences (USA) and several world governments and other research bodies have attempted to master this technology—with only limited success.

While machine translation is only able to provide the “gist” of the document being translated, this has not stopped the WWW from embracing this technology. The following article will highlight a few of the latest developments in Internet-based translation.

Communication obstacle

The Internet has interconnected the world in a global network, but the language barrier is still a great obstacle to global communication. The WWW is dominated by one language, with 86% of Web sites written in English. This bias is a major hindrance to effective global communications when you consider that almost 50% of Internet users come from countries where English is not the native language.

The communication obstacle has not been ignored, with several dot.coms providing various solutions to the language barrier. Translation, globalization, and localization companies such Worldlingo.com, E-Lingo, uniscape.com, E-Translate, Babelfish and FreeTranslate.com have provided various methods to make the Internet more language friendly. The methods include text translation, where you take text to a Web site for translation, Web site localization and the use of offline human translators.

MT alone is not enough

Until recently, the language industry has been divided into those who provide human translations and those who provide machine translations. Machine translations are used in a variety of ways by dot.coms, ranging from plug-in browsers to cut and paste boxes.

Worldlingo.com, a recent addition to the market, believes the two should not be used in isolation. The vision behind Worldlingo.com is seamless and time-efficient communication on the Internet.

Worldlingo.com uses machine translation to complement its database of human translators, as is evident in the company’s email translation service.

Businesses that communicate regularly with foreign language- speaking clients use this service to automatically translate an incoming message into the receiver’s language. Worldlingo.com’s service is similar to that of other companies such as E-lingo, but integrates human translation into the process by supplying a quote for a more precise translation with each free machine translation.

These online translation companies are not trying to compete against large localization companies such as Berlitz and SDL. Instead, they are concentrating on e-mail translation, which traditional translation service providers generally find too small to translate. In-house language translators also have no reason to feel threatened by Internet-based translation services, as their large workloads leave little time for these smaller rush jobs.

The combination of machine and human translations enables the customer to stay in control of the translation process. By initially obtaining the gist of the document, the customer can then decide whether it is important enough to have it professionally human translated.

Translation marketplace

Another new development coming soon is a Translatationwork.com. This Web site is in essence a database of human translators where, on the one hand, translators can promote their wares and on the other, take advantage of the Internet’s immediacy to ensure that they find demanded work very quickly.

As these few examples show, it appears that language translation is beginning to use then Internet to its full potential. The vision of a truly global WWW is becoming a reality.

Alistair H. Lindsay
Public Relations Officer
Worldlingo.com
Suite 168, 45 Cribb Street
Milton, Brisbane 4604
QLD, Australia
Tel.: +61 7 3211 3744
Fax: +61 7 3236 5575
E-mail: alastair@worldlingo.com