Machine translation: not a pseudoscience

摘要

It always amazes me how the business model of fortune-telling works. The essential part of this ndustry is to have plan B ready - to explain why he future does not correlate with the predictions. The machine translation (MT) industry, unfortunately, shares certain properties with fortune-telling. An average MT vendor, usually having acquired the product from someone else, provides the corporate customer with a black box. The customer uses the box. If the customer is all right with the result, everything's fine. If he or she isn't, the excuse is that there are some errors along the way. The computers have not evolved enough to handle human language efficiently. In other words, it's out of our hands - the celestial bodies are to blame. End of story.The main issue here is not the lack of options and not even the complexity of MT as software. The problem is that the resellers and integrators often are not adept in working with MT, and many of them view it as a black box where they put text in their native tongue and get back a bunch of characters in a language they don't understand. If it looks foreign, it probably worked.