We just received a machine translation offer from a company in Russia, unfortunately, it looks like they’ve been over using their product. The brand name is “Promt”, any English native will see the problem with this, whether deliberate or accidental, it looks like a typo, and won’t help them be taken seriously, it isn’t even phonetic as the second “p” in “prompt” should sound. The machine translation industry quotes 70% accuracy, but this type of claim needs to be treated very sceptically. At best machine translation gives you some understanding of the gist of a text, for example it will probably give you enough to understand whether you have received a genuine quote enquiry in another language, or just a computer generated junk e-mail which you can safely delete, but equally it might not…. Even at the level of positive and negative you may have problems. The wording will always be literal, and any word with multiple definitions will produce rubbish. More information about this type of issue can be found on our free translation page. Our translations are always human authored and edited, translators are highly skilled, and carefully selected.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 19th, 2010 at 11:25 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.