Like “may” –topic of our last 4 tips- there are thousands or perhaps tens of thousands other words that produce syntactical ambiguity within a sentence and are typically the hitch of all automatic translators.
We musn’t then blame automatic translation programs, nor blame MT (Machine Translation) as an industry specializing in electronic translation, being that its inefficiency is a consequence of the ambiguities of our language…or can we?
Each user will have his/her own opinion concerning this, but from Word Magic’s standpoint, a technology that, for whatever reason, fails to achieve success in the solution of a problem, well, just can’t be considered a practical technology.
We compare automatic computer translation with a half-finished bridge that takes us only up to the middle of the river, where the supports suddenly give way. At that point, the vehicles spiral into a free fall towards the river and sink there. The reader can imagine what it would be like if real-life bridges where actually made that way…
ESI STD & Home Edition
Word Magic Software also offers automatic translators (ESI Home Edition & ESI Standard) with the warning that the output is practical for read-only purposes, that is, to get the gist of what the document is saying in another language.
In this area, Word Magic has managed to make the bridge stretch out to at least 70% of the way, not 40%. It offers much more precision than the other programs available on the market, enough to understand even idioms and colloquial language, of which there are at least 130,000 idiomatic expressions in each language in our most recent database (ESI STD Version 4.46). And with each new version, both this number and the accuracy obtained grow more and more.
It is very probable that a future version of ESI STD will actually make it to 80% or more. But meanwhile…What will happen to the rest, to the 30% or 40% of the phrases that do not make it to the other shore of the river?
We will continue talking about this in the following tip, and also about the way we have managed to attack this deficiency: a practical solution, unique and exclusive to Word Magic Software with the invention of ESI PRO.
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