Don't count on machine translation

The question comes up time and time again: How good is computerized translation? The answer: Sometimes good enough to get the gist of what someone is saying, but not good enough to use for anything important. That was the conclusion I came to in a pair of surveys two years ago and five years ago. And from what I've examined more recently, computerized translation, at least that available online, hasn't improved much.
 
I'll repeat my conclusion, for the sake of those who haven't got the message yet: Don't count on automatic translation if the translation is important. An example of the perils of electronic translation surfaced recently in Suffolk County, New York. Someone in the elections department was responsible for getting voting instructions printed in Spanish. Rather than taking the obvious (but probably still inadequate) step of finding someone bilingual in the same building — one couldn't have been that hard to find — the department had the translation done by machine. According to an account in Newsday, the translation was so bad that it was incomprehensible. Potentially, litigation could result if it's determined that the translation was so bad it disenfranchised Spanish-speaking voters.
 
I haven't seen the translation, but the Newsday account gives two hints of how poor it was. For one, it used the word tablero, which means a board made of wood, rather than consejo, junta, comisión or some similar word to refer to the elections board. Similarly, one sentence that was supposed to say, "If you have not notified the board of your change of address, you may vote on a paper ballot at your new polling place," instead said the Spanish equivalent of "If you had not notified the gaming board of your change of address, you can vote over a paper ballot in your new voting place."
 
There are many, many tasks that computers can perform much better than humans. But language translation is not one of them. Read more... (Source: Newsday)