Book Review - .NET Internationalization

Machine Translation
Machine Translation (MT) appears to be fraught with danger. There is no single translation for most of the words we might want to localise in an application, therefore great care must be taken. The author goes to great lengths to make this point. Indeed, in order to demonstrate some of the issues surrounding MT, the author announces that this chapter will see the development of a cut down MT (a pseudo localiser) and a Translator Evaluator that is able to test the performance and compare the success of automatic translators. After a fairly detailed explanation of the author’s own a pseudo localiser, he then focuses on Internet-based translations tools, such as AltaVista and the Office 2003 Research Service (which includes a detailed examination of the WorldLingo translation service and the HTTP web requests and responses required to use the service).
The Translator Evaluator made for an interesting examination. It is pre-loaded with at least seven translation tools and it is capable of translating text from one language to another and back again. The reason why we translate the translated text back to its original language acts as a means of verification – it provides some level of confidence (an indicator if you will) in the translator’s ability.