SuperPower Nation Day and the Future of Machine Translation

Tuesday, 13 April 2010 16:08

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BBC's SuperPower season hosted an experiment last month where they had Google's translation software translate comments from the people who participated at the event in person or called on the phone.

As soon as the event started, many users expressed their approval of the kind of experience they had conversing with people who spoke a language different from their own. The languages that were available were English, Arabic, Chinese, Portuguese, Persian, Indonesian, and Spanish.

Of course, this only meant that using software can help reduce the barrier between different parts of the world, not that it could replace a human translator. That's because while the software was only able to provide translation good enough to get the message through. It was by no means a perfect translation.

This is great news for people who simply wish to converse with others without having to worry about the language and geographical location a person comes from. Even Google had no idea who their software would stand up to the scrutiny. "This is the largest translation project I've ever worked with," Chewy Trewhella, the new BDM (business development manager) for Google said.

This is especially great for the entire translations industry -- for both the clients and the translators -- contrary to what some people might think. This development will help translators save a large amount of time on their projects. They can use the software's help to generate a coarse translation and do the editing without need of buying expensive translation tools. And for consumers this would mean faster translations from professionals at lower cost.

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