Unfortunately it's not so simple... [LWN.net]

Unfortunately it's not so simple...

Posted Jan 8, 2012 20:52 UTC (Sun) by csawtell (guest, #986)
In reply to: Unfortunately it's not so simple... by job
Parent article: Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

I can't agree with the above with reference to Google Translate in Spanish to English translations. My experience is that the English result is perfectly readable. My immediate reaction was "Goodness me, this seems to actually work". From time to time, the result might be a bit stilted, but still perfectly readable and understandable. I was very surprised.

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Unfortunately it's not so simple...

Posted Jan 9, 2012 20:29 UTC (Mon) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link]

I get the impression that machine translation is still one of those cases where the results are highly variable. It's better when languages are more closely related and where they've put more effort into manually tuning the results. So a pair of reasonably closely related languages that get translated between a lot, like English and Spanish, are likely to produce much better results than two languages from different language groups, like English and Japanese, or a rarely translated pair, like Scots and Faroese.