Machine translation: The Missing Links in Global Communication
Globalization of the business environment sounds like a very profitable venture. However for the organizations, this is a multifaceted challenge. Besides managing the widespread business across various nations, the top management also needs to handle a multicultural and multilingual workforce as well as their customers. Being communicative on a global level helps organizations get local support.
The use of the English language as a medium of web communications is slowly decreasing. The cyberspace being occupied by e-commerce companies realize that to maximize their profits they must support multilingual communication and content. In an effort to maximize global revenue, these e-commerce companies target their markets with localized web content. Product features and specifications, data sheets, FAQ’s, testimonials and customer service offered in multiple languages helps to gain global support and build brand loyalty while cutting down on advertisement and overhead costs.
Customizing products and manuals for the different markets is not a new concept. The IT industry has been developing, customizing and translating software and manuals for various markets with the help of human translators. However with the advent of the World Wide Web, the localization process has gone online. Today, companies in culturally sensitive locations make use of human translation talents in combination with machine translation technologies. Survey reports have shown a growth of nearly 86 million websites within a two-year period resulting in the large demands for multilingual web content. Translation of such vast content into many different languages is only possible with the help of machine translation software.
Machine translation software with domain specific subjects is the trusted translation facilities for both small and medium enterprises as well large business houses. Machine translation systems can translate content between two or more languages. A bi-lingual system translates only between two particular languages, whereas multilingual systems translate between pairs of languages. Nevertheless, the innumerable website content and other documents translated every day causes security concerns for the online translation service.
Machine translation is carried out through various methods:
- Direct Machine Translation Approach
- Interlingual Approach
- Transfer approach
- Empirical Machine translation approach–which would include statistical machine based translation
Statistical machine translation depends on the statistical modeling of the words in the target language and its equivalences in the source language. This paves way for solutions to vague problems. The language model on the other hand ensures grammatically correct translations.
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