Efficacy of English to Spanish automatic translation
Jose H.Ablanedo, Milam W Aiken, Mahesh B. Vanjani · International Journal of Information and Operations Management Education · 2007
With an increase in global business, travel, and communication, there is a growing need to accommodate multiple languages. While human translators are still important, automatic natural language translation can increase the productivity of global travellers and office workers reading e-mail, browsing web pages, and reviewing documents. But, how good are these computer-based translations? In this paper, we compare English-to-Spanish translations from two computer programmes with two human-generated translations. As expected, the results show that the computer translations were much faster but less accurate. However, the tradeoff in speed vs. accuracy might allow computers to be used for a rough, first pass, while more expensive, and time-consuming human translation can be used for more critical text.