What's the difference between human and machine translation?

It's very simple, really. Human translation is done by humans and machine translation is done by software. Machine translation is also sometimes called software translation.

Human translation is superior to machine translation because human translators understand the context and content of the work being translated. Human translators recognize idioms and understand cultural differences, helping clients avoid embarrassing mistakes.

Machine translation is a great time and money-saver, BUT... also they are the greatest resource for misunderstanding, embarrassment and fun which you will experience further on this page.

However, some machine translation software programs can translate up to 1,000 words per minute. The quality, accuracy and speed of machine translation varies widely depending on the software vendor's technology. Some translation software packages take into account different grammatical structures, and some are even powerful enough to recognize words or phrases they've seen before.

To reap the cost benefits of machine translation and the more accurate translation offered by humans, always use a human translator to review machine-translated documents. The human proofreaders will often pick up words with a derogatory or different meaning in another language that a machine will miss.

There is no secret - software translators can't catch the meaning of what they translate. For instance, there are many words in different languages which are written in absolutely the same manner, but have absolutely different lexical meaning.

Let's take word "ключ" (kluch). "Ключ" meanings are: 1. Key to the door. 2. Water stream in the forest. 3. V-shaped manner of bird flock flying south in the autumn.

How can a virtual brain guess and guess correctly which meaning of the word being translated from the original text it has to substitute for that specific word if there are multiple choices?

Can you imagine what happens with idioms? What will happen to technical texts in the end?

Try to have some fun! Just for an experiment download this small piece of text which is FAQ-file for one of the most popular (in Ukraine at least) program FAR - File and Archive Manager. Then copy and paste text into the window below. Click "Translate!" button. Then, in the new translation window, copy and paste the translated into Russian text again and insert again in the translation window changing direction of the translation. In this way you will translate original text two times. Into another language and from that another (Russian) language backwards. And then try to compare both documents: original and what was made after double translation by "Machine" :) There were occasions when people could not stop laughing for half an hour! No kidding! Just try it for yourself and see. Spend 5 minutes, you won't regret it!

Download FAQ-file for fun! (7150 bytes).

SOCRATES - Engish-Russian full-text translator Enter word or sentence in Russian or in English:

Hopefully now dear visitor understands why the best possible interpreter must be human? Robots are not good enough!