Chapter 9. Machine Translation

WHEN IBM PC DOS WAS FIRST TRANSLATED into French, the DOS error message "Out of environment space" was translated as the French equivalent of "There is no room in the garden." I used to imagine French people looking forlornly out of the window thinking to themselves, "That may be true, but what's wrong with my computer?" The translation industry and the tools that it spawns have made great advances in the last 20 years, but the pitfalls are still the same. In this chapter, we look at how we can use machine translation (MT)translations performed by computers. We build a translation engine that we later use in Chapter 10, "Resource Administration," to automatically translate resources and to add whole new languages to an application at the click of a button, and in Chapter 12, "Custom Resource Managers," to perform automatic translation on the fly for applications with highly dynamic content.

The journey starts with a critique of the kind of success you can expect from machine translation. We create a foundation for the translation engine upon which all translators will be based. We create a range of translators that I have arranged into groups: pseudo translators, Web service translators, HTML translators, and an Office 2003 Research Service translator. Finally, we conclude with a simple utility, Translator Evaluator, that enables you to test and compare the success, performance, and accuracy of automatic translators.