Ten years ago, I wrote a short white paper about machine versus human translation for a local technical communications conference. Back in 1999, part of me worried (a little) that perhaps human translators would be out of work by 2009. Well, in the intervening years, that small doubt faded completely. Human translators will continue to enjoy relative job security — global financial meltdowns and recessions notwithstanding.

Machine translation involves the use of computer software to translate text from one language to another. The technology has been on a long steady march since WWII. In the last decade, it has made some advances in accuracy. However, the most important progress has been in access to the technology.

Back in the last century when I wrote my original white paper, AltaVista’s Babelfish had come online; making automatic, online — and important to most users — FREE translation available to the masses. Most recently, Google has begun to embed its Google Translate technology in Gmail. This is a pretty convenient place to have automatic free translation. Of course, most of us receive mainly just spam written in other languages, but, for a business user if you need to get the gist of a message, Google Translate is quick and easy. Just remember, it’s a dumb machine translating!!!! You will get a good laugh pretty much every time, but you can also glean important information.

Google is taking a different approach in that its technology uses statistical translation methods in which text submitted for translation is compared against massive databases of material that exists in both the source (original) and target languages. This is proving to be a more reliable approach, which yields better results than older software tools that rely solely on extensive dictionaries and grammatical rules. However, I suggest that you use automatic/machine translation for inbound communication only. If you need to write a reply, I urge you to get assistance from a professional translator. Remember, translation is like anything else — when it comes to automatic and free, you get what you pay for!