Everyone who’s used a machine translation app like Google Translate, Babylon, Jibbigo or iLingual will have experienced the thrill: the first time you copy-paste text in a previously unfathomable language and it translates it, instantly.

It’s intoxicating, and a little bit ‘Brave New World’, but along with that futuristic thrill comes a harsh reality. A machine translation app may be able to give you the gist of a piece of foreign language text – or even a very clear, literal translation – but it can’t compete with the delicacy and local knowledge of content translated by a human.

That being said, machine translation engines are becoming more and more sophisticated all the time, allowing for high-speed multilingual online communication. For businesses, this is a massive opportunity for growth, considering that more than 40% of internet users are not English speakers, according to 2013 statistics by Internet World Stats.

So how can online businesses make use of translation technology to expand their business into non-English speaking regions? And what place does the humble human translator have in this new world of machine translation? More.

See: Information Age

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