Chapter 8: Machine translation

To the uninitiated, machine translation (such as Google Translate) looks almost like magic: in goes text in one language and, voilà, out it comes in another. If that seems too good to be true, it is. The greatest disadvantage of machine translation is that you can never be sure that the translation is correct: some percentage of the output is always slightly wrong. We will explain in this chapter why this is and what you should bear in mind if you want to use machine translation responsibly.