On May 12, 2010, at 11:43 AM, James Bishop wrote: > Google offers page translations for free, via a drop-down menu on your > website. > http://translate.google.com/translate_tools
That's not translation, that is "gisting", linguistically speaking. It's suitable for people who come to a foreign site and need to get an idea what it is about, but like all generic machine-translation, the results are terrible. The only spot where machine translation is ready for prime-time today is for very simple translations that are restricted to a very particular domain, like weather reports, where you repeatedly have the same phrases etc. You do *not* want a badly translated web site. It'll reflect badly on your product, and can actually do more damage than it will help. There are many machine-translated iPhone applications and descriptions thereof in the app store, that would be good, but can't be used because you can't switch to the original language on a per-application language when the translation is just gibberish. Similarly, many users don't think to look for a language switch on a site, so if your translation in one language is bad, you're the one with the incomprehensible web site, not the one who took time to at least provide a general translation. -- Uli Kusterer "The Witnesses of TeachText are everywhere..."
