How good are automatic translation programs? What are the drawbacks?
I haven’t used programs as such but I have used web based ones and they work okay. Some of the problems are that many words in different languages have different meaning and context is hard for computers to work out. A great tip I heard when translating from your own language to another language was too then run it through the translator back to your language (i.e. English to Hungarian and then take that text and run it Hungarian to English) if the result is very close, the translation is probably good. Depending on what you need it for, if it is something pretty official, you probably should try to get a native speak to proof read the translation.
