New IDC Study #29917: Overcoming the MT Quality Impasse

It is important to distinguish between generic MT and customized MT. The SYSTRAN technology powering most of the Internet portals is a generic translation service that is based on the largest possible dictionaries. Its aim is to provide a "gisting level" translation service, such as looking at a foreign page and being able to understand the main lines of the page. The system must obtain not only a correct syntactic analysis of the text, but also a correct semantic analysis. This is because some words will have different meanings and syntactic behavior, depending on the semantic context in which they are used.

Even with the important specialized dictionaries the quality of the translation cannot always be fully satisfactory because of the total freedom and productivity of content on the web; the dictionaries selected cannot be the exact domain glossary due to extreme diversity; and the impossible task of having a complete description of all possible domains (a problem not only of cost, but of expertise). The key point is that no generic MT system today can solve all translation problems.