The exponential growth of enterprise content, driven by and coupled with increasing numbers of businesses opening up in overseas markets is creating overwhelming amounts of information that needs to be translated in various languages. Recently Common Sense Advisory organized a market research over the requirement for machine translation which included interviews with over 30 decision-makers at various business organizations and government agencies.
According to research findings, the interviewees said that they chose machine translation because of the extremely high amounts of content that was required to be translated and also because many such documents were required in the shortest possible time. There is a prevalent belief that machine translation is free, but it is not completely true because organizations that use it require to spend both time and money in configuring and training a machine translation engine. Furthermore, human input is required in the form of form of post-editing work because machine translation systems are yet to reach the stage where they can readily deliver language translations that are of acceptable quality.
It is important for companies to base their translation decisions on the overall picture to get a balanced idea of how much time and money they are actually saving by relying on machine translation compared to human translation.
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One Comment
Quote: machine translation systems are yet to reach the stage where they can readily deliver language translations that are of acceptable quality.
I disagree. In an evaluation, English text was translated into Spanish using Google Translate. Professional translators evaluated the machine translations. The machine translations have a satisfactory quality (http://www.international-english.co.uk/mt-evaluation-en-es.html).