Corinne McKay’s Thoughts on Translation blog contains a very interesting new post and comments about Google’s machine translation system. She experimented with the system and reported her findings.
I’ll go on the record as saying that I think that most translators are much too paranoid about machine translation. MT technology has come a long way, and I think that we’re on the cusp of its being considered a standard productivity tool for translators, much as translation memory is today. However, I think it’s not worth losing sleep about machine translation sending human translators the way of the telegraph operator.[...]
So, I decided to do my own unscientific test of what Google Translate is producing these days, using three different texts that are similar to what I might be translating on any given day: fluffy, dense and flowery. Let’s see how it did.
via Thoughts on machine translation « Thoughts On Translation.
The Compendium is a long list of translation environment and machine translation tools, sorted by product name and by supplier, and containing links to the relevant websites. At 100+ pages, this PDF file is a very exhaustive source of information for people interested in computer-assisted and machine translation. New entries are in green.
Compendium of Translation Software
directory of commercial machine translation systems and computer-aided translation support tools
compiled by John Hutchins
on behalf of the European Association for Machine Translation and the International Association for Machine Translation
Current edition (15th edition, January 2009) [PDF, 605KB]
via Compendium of translation software: directory of commercial MT and translation tools.
Google Translate can now detect the language of the source text pasted by the user. This service is rapidly growing into a solid option for fast , casual translations where the user needs to grasp the general meaning of a foreign-language text. In general, the translations seem to be better than the ones offered by other machine translation programs and services.
Here are some highlights about the service:
- 22 languages with bi-directional translation in all combinations, for a total of 506 language pairs
- Auto-detection of the pasted source text (first option in the source language drop-down button)
- Google Translate’s APIs allow developers to connect their applications to the service. It will be interesting to see which one of the many TEnT providers first comes up with a good implementation of this service. For instance, when a sentence has no matches in a translation memory, the TEnT could quickly query Google Translation and offer a draft automated translation that the human translator can adapt and proofread
Google Translate [via Google Operating System]
This software is a free multi-lingual aggregator of several on-line machine translation services, among which translate.google.com and Systran. The download and installation are pretty straightforward, but in our experience the interface was not very intuitive and the check boxes tended to be rather unresponsive. However, the software works well (if your expectations of machine translation aren’t too high) and fast. Here are some screenshots:
Paste the source text into the bottom pane. The “Services” tab contains the translation engines that are available, based on your language combination and topic fields (see further below). 
The “Languages” tab contains all the language combinations available. The availability of any given combination, however, depends on the choices made in the next tab, “Subjects”. Not all translation engines are available for all languages, so your best option may be to select the subject first and then check if your language combination is available in the “Languages” tab. 
The “Subjects” tab contains specialization fields that you can choose based on the type of source text you need to translate. Unfortunately, “Law” seems to be available for Italian, but if you select it the language combination becomes unavailable, so we had to stick to “+Common”.
After you’ve figured out your best options based on the language combination and subjects, click on the “Translate” icon on the bottom left corner. The top pane will contain the translated text delivered by the available translation engines. You may get error messages, for instance if a service is currently unavailable or if your source text is too long. In the screenshot below you can see the EN->IT translation of the Apache 2.0 license from the Google engine.
The excellent freewaregenius offers an in-depth review with descriptions of the program’s features.
Translate.Net home page
