Anyone that has tried machine translation knows that the results are disasterous if you have more than a couple of words you need translated, as the software has such limited understanding of language. Interestingly Business Week reports that an Israeli company is trying to develop software that will correct the grammar of English text. If they really can build a grammar corrector that doesn’t destroy the meaning of the sentence, it’s one step closer to usable machine translation. At Napier we’ve worked with clients on several machine translation experiments, and would love to one day be able to offer instantanious translations. With the current level of technology, however, we don’t see any of our team of over 30 translators going out of business in the near future!
