[dturnbull]

Don't overestimate automated translation. My girlfriend is a native Japanese speaker (and professional translator) and she laughs when she sees the results of Google Translate. Especially for a language like Japanese, nothing's going to beat a human being who takes pride in their work.

[xorcist]

My native language is a germanic one, Swedish, which is globally speaking pretty much as close to the English family as it gets. I know for a fact that Google Translate butchers it completely and it's sometimes hard to even understand the results. I can only imagine what it would do to Japanese or Chinese, which are much, much farther from English.

If you want a hint of what Google Translate does to a language, do it full circle. Translate a text from English to for example French, and then input the result for translation back to English. The resulting experience is pretty close to what the French user would get.

(It also doubles as comedy.)

[aikah]

But with a collaborative effort and machine learning,you can make a translator learn the subtilities of a language.The situation in 10 years regarding automated translation will be quite different from today.This is true with a number of "impossible tasks to automate" today.

[mrborgen]

Agree! I got really surprise when I tried to translate to my native language via Google Translate. It made me realise how crappy their translation really is.. :P