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.