One of the hot topics seen in Localization World Berlin was that of Machine Translation, an area that I have always been personally interested in and that I studied extensively while completing a Masters in Machine Translation at UMIST under the direction of Harold Somers. Although this area is still developing slowly (mainly due to lack of funding in MT, Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics’ projects) some success stories such as Meteo are widely known. The main public only has access to free translation websites or basic MT software often showing disastrous results. However, many companies (SAP and Océ Technologies have used machine translation successfully for many years) can now invest in this technology and enjoy the benefits of automated translation and terminology extraction purposes with the help of companies such as Syn-Tactic. While this technology evolves and improves we can still take car of the hard work!
