Lost In Translation: Machine Translations Fail in Wall Street Journal Test

Waiting for reliable and accurate machine language translation? Don’t hold your breath, says Sarmad Ali in this article from The Wall Street Journal. Ali tinkered with several online translation services, but was not impressed.

“Customers who have been waiting for such services to be perfected will find improvements are slow in coming,” Ali wrote. “Overall, I found the Arabic-English translations rife with syntactic and semantic errors—from the merely too-literal to the laughably bad…Free online translation tools help travelers or those curious about languages, but I found them unreliable for important documents. Use with caution.”