Reverse translating a T-Mail translation looks nothing like my original text. Why?
A. Translating gist translations back and forth is not a good way to test a machine translation. A machine translation gives the end user an IDEA of what the original author meant. Take an idea, bad grammar and all, and send it back through a translator and you get garbage back. A gist of a gist is essentially worthless. Fine nuances are lost. Perhaps as machine translation technologies improves, this back-and-forth test will work reliably. In the interim, the best test you can run is to send a passage through the translator. Send the translation to someone who is bilingual in these two languages and ask them to translate the text back to its original language. Compare their translation to the original text and see if the two mean the same thing. If they do, then the machine was successful. If the translation is not a close enough match for your needs, you will need to pay a human translator a fair wage to manually perform your translations.
