(…) While software developers and professional translators agree that the flowery language of poetry and literature would be better left to human translators, they have more trouble agreeing on the best use of machine translation programs. Professionals are debating the accuracy of translation software, its effect on jobs and what texts it can and cannot translate.

In 2010, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that the number of positions for foreign-language translators in the U.S. would increase by 42 percent over the next decade — three times the average for all industries in the U.S. job market. While exact numbers are unknown, there are probably hundreds of thousands of translators, interpreters and people who use language in their jobs.

While these professionals would probably all be able to tell the difference between “escape” and “glimpses” in their respective languages, they are needed less and less for jobs that involve translating chunks of text. Instead, machine translation, completed on computers, iPads and smartphones, is taking over those jobs.

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But machine translation programs struggle with sentence structure, especially when two languages differ. For example, designing a program that can rewrite English in German or Spanish is easier than doing so in Chinese. More.

See: The Pitt News

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