Looking at the findings, it should come as no surprise that all of the machine translation tools produced poor results in terms of the number of errors, or that after the translations passed through a round of human editing, the number of errors were drastically reduced. What is interesting, though, is that certain online tools performed better than others, and specific language combinations produced varying results. The graph below shows results from German into Spanish (the researchers used EvalTrans Software). The best translation machine is the one showing the lowest word error percentage (WER). Check out the study for more charts and an explanation of the sentence error rate (SER).

Doctors Lola García-Santiago and María-Dolores Olvera-Lobo do a thorough job of laying out the methodology that they followed, and of acknowledging the difficulties inherent to such studies. They write that,

Evaluation of machine translation is an unresolved research problem that has been addressed by numerous studies in recent years. The most extensively used assessment tools are classified into two major groups: automatic objective methods, and subjective methods (Tomás, Mas & Casacuberta, 2003). The objective evaluation methods compare a set of correct translations of reference against the set of translations produced by the translation software under evaluation. The units of measurement most often used work at the lexical level, comparing strings of text.

For García-Santiago and Olvera-Lobo, a possible solution to the challenge of multilingual information retrieval lies in the potential of cross-language Question-Answering Systems (QA Systems). Their model takes into account only the scope of this particular study, but it led me to think in terms of potential multilingual data retrieval for the internet as a whole. Considering the amount of information being created and stored online, it simply isn’t possible for every document that a searcher might find useful (web page, journal article, etc) to be translated into the language that every searcher speaks. Rather than focus on whole documents, García-Santiago and Olvera-Lobo’s cross-language QA System is very much in tune with the current trend in online technology that aims to improve search capability by creating a natural language data retrieval system — one in which questions are entered as search queries and a search engine would retrieve not whole documents, but discreet sections from documents that are found to contain answers to the question. As the researchers put it,

Cross-language question-answering systems can be the solution, as they pursue the search for a minimal fragment of text, not a complete document.

This would enable the evolution of the Semantic Web, towards which we are already headed, to deal properly with multilingual content. With the rise of internet use and website creation in China and throughout the developing world, the web has the potential to become a universal source of research and knowledge; however, that can’t happen until we deal with the basic question of language. For professionals in the language industry, the question is amplified a bit: who will be the ones opening up the web to cross-linguistic data retrieval, humans or machines? I suspect that the simple answer is both.

As more research is conducted, and the developers behind the powerful online translation tools continue to improve their machines (which, in Google’s case, they are already doing with the help of everyone who uses the tool and suggests better translations or participates in their Translator Toolkit) we will likely see a hybrid effort with developers and professional translators working together to break language barriers online.

In the meantime, while these advances are being made behind the tech and academic scenes, Language Service Providers are trying new and interesting ways to combine human and machine translation efforts to improve business. Several large scale translation agencies offer free machine translation services through their websites, or by developing tools for web publishers. In most cases, these tools are provided to increase the number of visitors to their corporate sites, and to increase brand visibility. Since the quality of machine translation remains so low, all professional translation jobs must be handled by human translators, and the free tools are just a way to get people in the door, so to speak.

Other translation companies have developed tools that provide machine translation for web publishers to place on their sites, making it easy for a visitor to switch between English, Japanese, German, or even Welsh. The downside, of course, is low quality. Translation tools that offer only automated translation are good first steps for web publishers who can’t afford to pay professionals to do it right, but the multilingual visitor will get no more than the gist of the content. For our own part, ALTA’s developers are working on a side project called Virtual Language that combines the usability of the major automated translation services with a web analytics feature that shows how many times a site was translated, and which languages were chosen. In addition to site translation data, Virtual Language will offer suggestions on the best translation machines for certain language combinations, as determined by our own team of professional translators using the EvalTrans software in much the same way that the researchers from The University of Granada conducted their study. This insight from professional translators will help developers, users, and publishers with quantitative data on machine translation quality, and the web analytics provide hard data displayed in charts like the following:

By providing this analytics platform to bloggers and business sites we hope to encourage publishers to seek professional translation. It is data that can be used to justify the quality investment of using professionals to translate online content. We think of it as harnessing the power of machines to help provide work for humans, and as most translators would probably agree, we’d like to see a future that keeps the balance that way. As technological advances continue to improve the way we conduct research, do business, and get media online, multilingual search will undoubtedly become an integral aspect of the work we do.

                          

Is your business being held back from the global marketplace? Targeting your business to fit an international market is as much a necessity as it is an opportunity. America today is far more diverse than it was just twenty years ago. If you do not have your web site translated into other languages, you are not only ignoring the increasingly multicultural U.S. population, but you are also losing out on a fast-growing world audience. Here are four important ways your business will benefit from having a multilingual web presence.

1) Global Consumerism

The United States is no longer the world’s most significant mass market -especially since the U.S. dollar has steadily lost value. The phenomena of mass consumerism and conspicuous consumption -something that was once considered as mainly an “American thing” is quickly reaching other countries. Dubai now has the largest mall in the world. If you have been to Beijing or Shanghai lately, you may have noticed that shopping has practically become a national pastime. The Chinese are buying cell phones, refrigerators, computers, cars, toys, furniture, tv’s, airliners and designer clothing in ever greater numbers.

2) Multilingual Internet Users

According to the 13th Edition of the Ethnologue (1996) there are roughly 885 million Mandarin Chinese speakers. That’s more than double the 322 million English speakers. The percentage of Internet users who are not native English speakers is increasing rapidly -especially in Asia.

According to the latest Nielsen Global Online Survey on Internet Shopping Habits, almost 90 percent of the world’s online population has used the Internet to make a purchase. If you think most of these online purchases come from the United States, you’re wrong. The highest percentage of online shoppers is found in South Korea, where 99 percent of those with Internet access have used it to shop, followed by the UK (97%), Germany (97%), Japan (97%), with the U.S. coming in at the eighth position –94%.

3) Assurance of Clear and Effective Communication

Providing a clean and concise message is the single most important thing a company can do to promote their business. Why risk messy direct translations when you can hire a professional to translate complete ideas -conveying the intended meaning with tone and other nuances that a non-professional would miss? Also, a good translator can help you “localize content”, making it fit within the laws, social norms, and buying habits for your target market. No one wants to be considered “foreign.” That is why making your brand blend in with the cultural fabric of any country is very important.

4) Search Engine Optimization

Over 60% of web users don’t speak English, making it impossible for them to find and use your web site. In order to achieve high rankings and good online results, you must understand how your customers search online. With a web site translation, you will be using the terminology your foreign customers prefer, which may be VERY different from what your English-speaking customers are using to find you.

To read more about quality website translation for your business or non-profit organization, or to obtain a free estimate for a translation project, check out the following page: Website Translation Service.

                          

Technology has come a long way, but translation software still has far to go before it could be deemed anywhere near trustworthy. Granted, if it worked well, I think I’d be out of a job! But I’m not alone in my opinion.

A recent CNN.com article reviewing translation software suites agrees, and the title pretty much says it all: Translation Software Still Fails – Badly. Even though the point of these products is to save you money, their poor quality, incorrect terminology, and the myriad of other issues plaguing machine-generated translations can end up costing you more in the long run. The bottom line is that translation software is currently incapable of deciphering the cultural and linguistic nuances of a typical business translation.

One example often referred to by my colleagues is how to get a machine to understand and correctly translate text such as “a drug-free workplace?” More often than not, the language translation software will spit back a translation that actually reads, “free drugs in the workplace.” Not exactly what you want in your employee handbook.

That being said, there have been some significant strides in translation software to aid human translators. Many translators utilize computer-assisted translation (CAT) software tools in order to speed up their translation and maintain consistency throughout documents. These tools search for repetition within or between documents, cutting down the time and cost of translation where applicable. And for upcoming projects with anticipated repetition, a memory of the initial translation can be leveraged against future documents.

Overall, though, I think the score reads, machines: 0, humans: 1 (take that, Terminator).