How Good Is It ?

The short answer to this question is that it's not perfect, and you wouldn't want to ship your application with a wholly machine-based translation. You should look at machine translation as a means of providing a first-cut translation. This first attempt would be handed over to a human translator (along with the original language upon which the translation was performed), who would fix the translation mistakes.

Machine translation offers a number of benefits. It significantly reduces the amount of work that the translator has to do and, therefore, reduces the cost of translation. One statistic states that the maximum number of words a translator can translate per day is 2,000. A crude estimation of the time involved in translation can be gained from adding the number of words in your resources and dividing by 2,000. The resulting time will certainly be longer than it would take a machine to translate the same text.

In addition, machine translation produces a first-cut translation that can be used for testing and demonstration purposes. The development team commonly doesn't speak the target language of the application, so, to them, a first-cut translation to the target language is indistinguishable from the final translation. The benefit, though, is that the development team and the user acceptance team can clearly see that a translation has been performed and can detect problems in the internationalization process early in the development process.

The longer answer to the question "How good is it?" requires a recognition of the problems of machine translation. Most languages are ambiguous, and English is one of the most ambiguous. If you look up a word in a dictionary, you will probably find several meanings for the same word. For example, the English word close can mean "to shut," "to be near," "to finish," or "to be fond of," and each meaning often has a different word. The correct meaning can be inferred only from either the surrounding words or the context in which the phrase is used. To help with the problem of context, some machine translators support a "Subject" setting that enables you to specify a genre or industry in which the words are used (e.g., Science, Sport, Accounting, Aviation, Medical). However, this doesn't always help. Often when a machine translator cannot determine the context of a word, it makes its best guess. The English phrase "Log off" seems obvious enough to an English speaker, but translated into German, it can get translated as "Plank of wood away" (Log is "plank of wood" and off is "away").

In addition, there is no one "true" translation for most words or phrases. If you translate the simple English word Enter into German, various translators will return "Kommen Sie herein," "Kommen Sie," "Tragen Sie ein," and "Hereingehen." If you are looking for a gauge of how accurate your translation is and you don't speak the target language yourself, try translating from your own language to the target language and back again. If you get the original text back again, the translation is more likely to be accurate (but this isn't a guarantee because it could be translated incorrectly in both directions). The reverse, however, isn't necessarily true, so if you don't get your original text back, it doesn't necessarily follow that the translation is wrong. (If you are looking for some translation-related fun, you could write a kind of translation Chinese whispers quote of the day program in which you translate a phrase through several different languages and finally back to the original language, and see what you get.) This is one of the reasons why "universal translators" that translate all languages into an intermediate language such as Esperanto and then from the intermediate language to the target language don't fare so well in terms of accuracy.

Finally, it should be pointed out that correct spelling and grammar are a prerequisite for a successful machine translation. If words are spelled incorrectly, a machine translator cannot possibly translate the word correctly (and this can affect the success of the translation of the surrounding words). See the "Resource strings should be spelled correctly" rule in Chapter 13, "Testing Internationalization Using FxCop," for details on checking the spelling of your resources.