Thanks to the internet, this [translation] is now a relatively flexible and cheap process. At the base of the translation hierarchy are free services offered by Google and others. Such services “learn” by analysing collections of documents that have been translated by humans, such as the records of the European Parliament, which are translated into 11 different languages. These collections are so big, and the machines that analyse them so powerful, that automatic translation (known in the jargon as “machine translation”) can usually convey the gist of a text, albeit it in a slightly garbled manner. Google and its rivals focus on widely spoken tongues, but academics are working on machine-translation services for more obscure languages.

An army of volunteer translators occupies the next level up in the hierarchy. Several prominent English-language publications, including this newspaper, are regularly translated into Mandarin by groups of unpaid volunteers for the benefit of other readers (see ecocn.org/bbs). More formal projects also exist. At Global Voices, a kind of polyglot bloggers’ collective, around 200 volunteers select and translate their colleagues’ posts. Items on Meedan, a social network dedicated to the discussion of Middle East news, are translated into English or Arabic by machine and can then be tidied up by readers.

Paid human translators, unsurprisingly, still produce the best results. But even here costs are coming down, as the translation industry is shifting from project-based to piecemeal working…

See: The Economist