Machine Translation is the process of using computer software to translate between languages. Currently, these programs can be grouped into three main categories:
- RULE-BASED TRANSLATION Produced using existing grammar rules and dictionary entries.
- STATISTICAL TRANSLATION Uses data from a large amount of existing bilingual material, known as a corpus, to translate commonly used words and phrases. Examples of multilingual data include the records of the European Parliament, which is produced in 23 languages. Google Translate has been using this type of software since 2007.
- HYBRID MACHINE TRANSLATION Ideally uses the best features of both statistical and rule-based translation. SYSTRAN, which powers Babel Fish, claims that it introduced the first hybrid translation engine in 2009.
Does Avantpage Use Machine Translation?
There is no part of our process in which we submit text into a computer program and then get a translated document back. We use humans to translate our clients’ documents — human linguistic experts who are native speakers, understand cultural sensitivity, know industry terms, and know local dialects. Because we treat every document that we produce with the utmost care, we choose not to use machine translation tools at this time.
What about Google Translate?
Google’s free Translate application is now able to handle 52 modern languages. This is extremely impressive, considering the fact that it has taken Google only a short time to do this compared to other machine translation companies. Instead of using a billion words to model the English language, Google accesses several hundred billion words. The result is a translation engine that is excellent if you need to get a fast, rough translation (such as reading a news article from another country) to simply understand the gist of a document.
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Should you have any questions at anytime about your quote, your project, or process, please feel free to ask your project manager or email us at [email protected]. We want to consistently provide you the service and product quality that meets your specific translation needs.
