Machine translation in action

Has your boss asked you to use Google or AltaVista or some other flavor of machine translation to lower your translation costs?

Here's somebody who has put his money where your boss' mouth is.

Controlled language website attracts visitors from 110 countries

www.muegge.cc, a website dedicated to demonstrating the value of controlled language authoring and machine translation (MT), has attracted visitors from more than 110 countries since its launch in the summer of 2006. One of the unique features of this website is the fact that it uses Google language tools to automatically translate the site's content into 15 language pairs such as German to English or English to Simplified Chinese. The website was created from the ground up for MT, and all text was written in compliance with the CLOUT rule set, a controlled language designed specifically for MT.

muegge.cc, E-mail: info@muegge.cc, Web: http://www.muegge.cc

How do they do it? By controlling the text that goes into the translation machine. The simpler, more predictable and better structured the text, the more likely it can generate a satisfactory translation. In other words, machine translation would probably work better on a page of Hemingway than on a page of Shakespeare or Faulkner.

Don't forget, though: What you save in translation, you'll spend in whipping your writers into line. It may not look like real dollars, but it's time.

And time, as they say, is money.