The Translation Challenge

The Internet provides information everywhere on every subject in any language; yet, the content does not cross the language barrier.

Although not everyone is convinced, it is becoming clearer that English is not the global language of the Internet. Website owners realize that in order to really go global, localization is required.
However, localization is perceived as an expensive and complex task that usually duplicates the content and is difficult to manage.

Many companies and organizations invest time, energy and resources in an effort to make the Internet multilingual. It is interesting to look at the different approaches taken to take on this challenge.

The most popular method today is Machine Translation (MT), and there are a variety of Websites that provide this service for free.
Another growing method of mass translation is a group collaboration of translators (croudsourcing).

MT is evolving and improving, yet it is controversial whether it will indeed become the means that truly makes the Internet multilingual.
Most see this as insufficient in its current form, while some see that it has its place only for users wanting to understand the gist of things.
The current MT limitation also encourages the development of the field of Language for Special Purpose (LSP), which is a development of a simplified language that could more easily be machine translated.

Another emerging interesting approach is that MT together with croudsourcing may indeed evolve to introduce a robust solution.

In my upcoming blog posts, I will talk more about the different forms of the 3 approaches introduced above and some new ones. The field of computational linguistics and its supporting disciplines is hot these days, and I invite you to keep reading this blog and, of course, comments are welcome.

The multilingual challenge

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