The most important part of the translation software is the accuracy of translation. Translation software is worthless if it gives you text that’s impossible to understand. So we devised a test to quantify just how useful and accurate translation software is. Below is the explanation of how the test worked.
The Translation Language
We chose to test all the translation software on their ability to translate from Spanish to English, for two reasons. First, Spanish is a common language that people frequently need to translate into English, and second, it’s the only language pair common to every program we reviewed. While the accuracy of specific language pairs in different translation software may vary slightly, the results of this Spanish to English test will give an approximation of each program’s effectiveness.
The Original Text Source
Each translation software program was given three paragraphs to translate. The paragraphs were written by native Spanish speakers and were taken from three separate news stories featured in El Sol de Mexico newspaper on May 16, 2008.
The Translation Errors
Once we received the three translations from each program, we tabulated the number of errors in each translation. The errors were categorized in one of two ways: translation errors occurred where words were translated incorrectly or not translated at all, and syntax errors involved phrases with incorrect word order that could lead to misunderstanding.
The Translation Effectiveness Ranking
The errors were added up for each paragraph, and then added up and weighted for each program (translation errors were weighted heavier than syntax errors). We ranked the translation software according to the number of errors overall, with the least amount of errors ranking highest.
The results of the tests are displayed in our articles page, divided into three articles according to the three test paragraphs. You can view the results each translation software program gave by viewing Translation Test 1 Results, Translation Test 2 Results and Translation Test 3 Results.
To see the translation software that performed the best in our test, read the review of Babylon.
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