Machine Translation

Machine translators are programs that translate text. They can be Windows programs, Web services, or Web sites. They provide a way of automating the translation of your application. You must decide whether to use them, and, if so, how much to use them. Start with the premise that machine translation will not be perfect. It will make mistakes. If you use a machine translation, you must also follow up the machine translation with a review by a human translator who can catch all the machine's translation mistakes. That said, many of the translations will be correct, and this approach can significantly reduce the amount of time that it takes for the overall translation effort (and, therefore, the cost of that effort). In addition, this approach is very useful for getting a demo version of the application up and running with little or no translation cost. Consider that if you demo the Greek version of your application using a machine translation, it will be indistinguishable from a human translation to someone who cannot read Greek.

Another very important use for machine translation is to create a pseudo translation of your application. A pseudo translation is a translation to a pseudo language that looks very similar to the original language but that can also be identified as not the original language. The benefit of a pseudo translation is that it allows developers to test that the application is localizable while still being able to read the prompts in the application so that it can be used without having to learn another language. This approach is a very useful strategy in testing an internationalized application. However, it requires you to choose a culture that is used for the pseudo translation. If you are using the .NET Framework 2.0, the best solution to this is to create a custom culture specifically for this purpose (this is one of the examples in Chapter 11, "Custom Cultures"). If you are using .NET Framework 1.1, then the best solution is to hijack an existing culture.