Digital humanities: Can machine translation replace human translation

Abstract

MT is a sub field of computational linguistics and it uses different software or online translating tools to translate text/documents from one language to another. MT has become quite popular because of its use in business and commerce industries. These industries believe it to be cost efficient, easy and faster. Hence, these industries wish to get rid of human translators and they want their documents, emails etc. to be translated through Google, Bing, Babylon and other similar tools. However, there is a great need of improvements in the quality of translations done with the help of these online tools. At times, they are not at par human translations. This paper provides a detailed description of Machine Translation, its development and its relevance in contemporary scenario. It also focuses on issues like the need for linguists in MT and if MT can replace human translation. We have validated our claim by evaluating the translations of Google and Bing Translators on 500 sentences. In all cases the results was not at per human translations.