Sometimes people feel the cost of using a human translator is too great. They decide to use a machine translation program instead. There are a variety of such programs available, including some that offer their services online. But the best that can be said for them is that they are not very good. I used one of the well-known online machine translation programs to perform a test.
I wanted a sample of English text that was relatively easy to understand, so I chose this passage from a book for foreign students to study English:
Original English: The Golden Gate Bridge is a beautiful bridge. It is a suspension bridge in San Francisco. The bridge opened in 1937.
I then ran the text through the translator three times -- once for Simplified Chinese, once for Japanese, once for Korean. I took the results for each language and ran them back through the same translator to translate back to English. These are the results:
Simplified Chinese: The gold
Sometimes people feel the cost of using a human translator is too great. They decide to use a machine translation program instead. There are a variety of such programs available, including some that offer their services online. But the best that can be said for them is that they are not very good. I used one of the well-known online machine translation programs to perform a test.
I wanted a sample of English text that was relatively easy to understand, so I chose this passage from a book for foreign students to study English:
Original English: The Golden Gate Bridge is a beautiful bridge. It is a suspension bridge in San Francisco. The bridge opened in 1937.
I then ran the text through the translator three times -- once for Simplified Chinese, once for Japanese, once for Korean. I took the results for each language and ran them back through the same translator to translate back to English. These are the results:
Simplified Chinese: The gold
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