One Hour Translation Blog

Machine translation like Google Translate became a very popular translation tool.In some cases machine translation can help read and understand the general meaning of a short text.  When it comes to professional translation only human that understands what the text is about can get the job done right.Famous examples (which are already hard-coded in Google Translate) are “The bird flies like a bat” which can be understood in several ways by a machine. Obviously the quality of machine translation is far from acceptable for professional use.

In order to find if a machine translation has been used One Hour Translation developed … Continue Reading

Some of our customers sent us this really important piece of information published by Google in its official webmaster blog on March 19, 2010:

“We recommend that you do not allow automated translations to get indexed. Automated translations don’t always make sense and they could potentially be viewed as spam. More importantly, the point of making a multilingual website is to reach a larger audience by providing valuable content in several languages. If your users can’t understand an automated translation or if it feels artificial to them, you should ask yourself whether you really want … Continue Reading

Machine translation is fast becoming the wave of the future for the translation field thanks to innovations like the Google Transliteration IME. Granted, human translation will probably remain as the dominant translation system thanks to the limitations of our present translation technology and the inimitable capabilities of the human mind, but the sheer handiness of this type of software is still something of note.

Even though machine translation still couldn’t beat the accuracy of the bilingual-to-multilingual staff of professional translation firms or the per-word economy of translation service freelancers, the Google … Continue Reading

Google Translate (GT) is a popular translation service provided by Google to translate a word, a phrase, a section of text or an entire web page into one of 51 languages mentioned below. It can even provides translated search i.e. one can search a particular keyword in a source language in the target language websites for content and have it translated back into source language. The keyword is first translated into the target language and then the search is conducted in that language. Once the relevant web pages have been found, it is translated back into … Continue Reading

When you have a business and you wish to promote it online, the best way to go about it is create a website, post ads and submit content to other websites. This will help bring traffic to your site which in turn will boost your business and revenues. This has been the most common procedure for almost anyone who wants to boost their business. This is a good reliable procedure no doubt, but when you have a website that caters to the speakers of one language, it happens to limit the traffic that visits your website to the speakers of … Continue Reading

Limitations of automatic translation

In the previous part of the article we discussed what machine translation is and here we continue our discussion on the limitations of machine or automatic translation.

Even the most sophisticated software cannot substitute the skill of a professional translator. The reasons why machine translations are not as satisfactory as human translation are many. Ambiguity in translation is the result of one word having many meanings depending on the context. Disambiguation involves use of either shallow approach that uses statistical techniques to remove ambiguity or the deeper approach that involves comprehensive knowledge of a word. The former … Continue Reading

What is automatic translation?

Automatic or machine translation is the use of state of the art technology for translation of a text from one natural language to another without the intervention of human beings. With the advent of digital computers, it usually refers to using software tools that carry out the translation.

The translation process is an inherently complex one and not easily amenable to automation. Translation is not a mere word-for-word substitution. The translator must interpret and analyze all the words in the text and know how each word / sentence influences another. One of … Continue Reading

If weren’t for the superiority of human translation over machine translation, then most companies would be relying on machine translators exclusively. At any rate, multinational enterprises need to realize sooner rather than later that professional translation is an expertise that should never be underestimated.

In general, the art of translation and translation services don’t just depend on word-for-word replacement of a source language text with a target language equivalent. If that were the case, then human translation would be rendered obsolete by machine translation. At the moment though, … Continue Reading

Website owners and marketing professionals are usually focused on English-speaking target demographics, and understandably so: this is the language in which they can most easily communicate with their clients.
When companies define the target demographic on which to focus when marketing their products, they often operate under the unwritten working assumption that the said demographic speaks English.
Some marketing executives will claim that their companies’ products are sold “around the globe”, while in reality it may well be the case that only English speakers were exposed to these products, because their websites as well as their marketing people and materials are communicating … Continue Reading