The State of Machine Translation

Machine translation plays a role in successful localization. Multilingual Connections recently partnered with Intento, Inc. to give you an update on the state of machine translation. Our experts performed Language Quality Assurance for three key domains: hospitality, travel, and tourism. 

Intento’s report was published in December and provides a comprehensive evaluation of machine translation (MT) models for five domains.

As we’ve discussed in previous blog posts, relying solely on machine translation can produce some unfortunate (yet memorable) results. For example, one may remember when Meta (formerly Facebook) apologized for incorrectly translating a Chinese leader’s name to “Mr. Shithole” in English. MT has its limits, and overstepping them may have serious consequences.

In a February 2017 human vs. machine translation competition held in Seoul, the humans won by a long shot. That said, five years of improvements have solidified the meaningful role MT plays alongside humans in producing efficient, quality translations. Below is a summary of findings from Intento’s report:

For more information on our MT service offerings, please check out our service page and get in touch. We look forward to working with you!