Thursday, December 20, 2007

Personal Technology - WSJ.com

Personal Technology - WSJ.com: "As the need for global communication increases, online translation services are in greater demand. Users are attracted to the breakneck speed at which online translation is done and the price. Those that aren't free are still fairly inexpensive.
New languages have been added to the traditional lists and Arabic, in particular, has been in demand recently. I spent the past few weeks tinkering with four free online services, translating various texts from English to Arabic and vice versa to test their speed and accuracy. I tested Google's Language Tools and services from Applied Language Solutions, WorldLingo Translations and Systran.
Customers who have been waiting for such services to be perfected will find improvements are slow in coming. Overall, I found the Arabic-English translations rife with syntactic and semantic errors -- from the merely too-literal to the laughably bad."

No comments: