Machine Translation Explorations This blog is a place for me to share one of my interests, Machine Translation, and more generally, Artificial Intelligence.  As a translator for some 25 years, I am mainly interested in how Machine Translation is directly impacting the work of translat

I am noticing an increasing number of online automatic translation services. Here are a few possibilities. They are in the order that I came to learn about them, not necessarily in order of effectiveness. Let me know in the comments if you have some experience in comparing the quality

In a previous post (Progress in Machine Translation – Backtranslation samples then and now), I used the technique of backtranslation to demonstrate the progress of machine translation over the last few years. In this post, I am using the same technique in an opposite way, to sho

The Tool Box Newsletter by Jost Zetzsche is a must for translators who want to get the most out of applying technology to the translation process. All the latest news on all the latest tools for translators. I mention it here in particular because it frequently includes news on develo

Today, a smartphone with a translation app can be an invaluable tool when travelling in a country where you don’t know the language, as testified by this article appearing today in the New York Times: “Lost in Translation -Try a Google App“. I recently had an experie

I like reading the online news in Spanish, as a way of learning Spanish. To facilitate my learning, it is great to be able to generate a quick translation of a word or sentence and easily compare it to the original text. The most convenient way I have found to do this is with the free

A translation client recently called me with a specific request. They needed to respond to emails from around the world in English. They were using online machine translation from French to come up with draft messages that they then revised. But the English of some of their staff was

There has been a marked change in the way I translate in the past year. I have now become a confirmed reviser or “post-editor” of machine translation (MT) rather than translating from scratch. This has happened since machine translation was integrated into the workflow of

Ten years ago, I viewed machine translation more as a joke than as a useful translation tool. Thus I included an amusing machine translation experiment in the humour section of my website: A Folksinger Christine Lavin had investigated the results of automatic translation of some of he