The summary at the end of this article says it all, “machine translation has a long way to go in the accuracy realm”. Give it a try here. And the article is here.

Microsoft has launched a new translation service intended to complement Windows Live Search. Although the automatic translation service is currently on a separate page, it would appear that Microsoft intends to integrate Translator into the main Live Search page at some point. Such a move would bring Live Search up to speed with the other major search players, which already offer some form of translation service.

…As we’ve mentioned when we looked at other services, like those from Google, machine translation has a long way to go in the accuracy realm, but it’s not a bad way to get the overall gist of a document and Windows Live Translator’s side by side comparison features nicely compliment this approach.

But for fun I’ve decided to try to try some translations on our own. How about some Shakespeare, from English to Spanish and back to English again. The original was changed to…

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet

-became-

A rose by any other name would smell like candy

and

To be or not to be, –that is the question

-became-

To be or not to be, –that one is the question

and

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears

-became-

The friendly, Romans, countrymen, lend their ears to me

Nothing major, but these are simple, single sentence translations. Now try this with your HR policy.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 10th, 2007 at 5:32 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.