What is Computer-Generated or Machine Translation (MT)?
Computer-generated translations are created by a computer. Since computers do not yet possess “life knowledge”, machine translations are not perfect. A computer doesn’t know that “dusting” a field means putting dust on it, while “dusting” a table means taking dust off it. In another language the translation for “drive” is probably different depending on whether one is driving a golf ball or a car, and a computer can easily get it wrong. However, machine translation is nearly instantaneous and thus ideal for many purposes where human translation is simply not feasible. Machine translation is commonly used for rapid, draft-quality translations that provide individuals with the “gist” of language documents such as email, Web pages and correspondence. A “gisted” translation allows the reader to understand the meaning of the original document and determine its relevance to their business.
