Machine Translation - The Basics by t'works

Like translation,

baking a cake follows a basic process that involves many variables to achieve a desired result. Moreover, a baker can bake one cake by hand or thousands by machine: it depends on the customer’s requirements. Just like sometimes producing cakes by the thousands is the way to go, you’ll find many situations where machine translation is the preferred process for translating hundreds, even thousands of documents.

In the below resources, you’ll find that information easily and quickly laid out for you so you can get a grasp of machine translation in about 30 minutes.

Which is enough time to enjoy a piece of cake and a cup of coffee while legitimately working.

Heck, if you want to chew while you’re asking us questions about machine translation on the phone, go right ahead.


When did it begin?

Machine translation has come a long way in the last few years, but do you know when the first MT was developed and what technology it used? Climb the ladders on our timeline to sort your neural from your rule-based machine translation.


Machine Translation Timeline by t'works

Where do you stand in the MT discussion?

There are many situations where machine translation is the preferred process for translating hundreds, even thousands of documents. Is it better than human translation? Click the link below.


Human Translation vs Machine Translation

Human Translation versus Machine Translation:


Speed, quantity, lower cost: those are the three strengths of machine translation. If the original documents are straightforward, such as technical translations and instruction manuals, and the quantity is high, machine translation can translate more words in a given time frame than a human translator, thus reducing overall project costs.

However, if a computer doesn’t recognize a word, it can’t call up a colleague to ask for help. A machine translator will only be as good as its training, the human equivalent of memorizing. A computer doesn’t learn how to find more information: it must be given the information it needs to work with. That being said, a machine translator can have billions of translations on its servers to draw from before it runs into this problem.

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When MT mistakes are no laughing matter


Social media’s suitability for machine translation is to say the least, debatable. The very nature of Facebook, Twitter and the like is one of relaxed, informal and fashionable language which is often colloquial and changes constantly. Everything that MT finds challenging.

Just how quickly inaccurate translation can spread in this age of social media has been seen recently in Mexico. Although whether or not this was machine translation remains unconfirmed, the mistranslations on the website this August were trending on Twitter and caused the English version of the website to be shut down completely. Not ideal during a pandemic when your country is trying to restore confidence and attract visitors.

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