Title: Efficacy of English to Spanish automatic translation

Authors: Jose Ablanedo, Milam Aiken, Mahesh Vanjani

Addresses: School of Business Administration, University of Mississippi, University, MS 38677, USA. ' School of Business Administration, University of Mississippi, University, MS 38677, USA. ' Associate Professor of Management Information Systems, Business Administration Department, Jesse H. Jones School of Business, Texas Southern University, 3100 Cleburne Avenue, Houston, Texas 77004, USA

Abstract: With an increase in global business, travel, and communication, there is a growing need to accommodate multiple languages. While human translators are still important, automatic natural language translation can increase the productivity of global travellers and office workers reading e-mail, browsing web pages, and reviewing documents. But, how good are these computer-based translations? In this paper, we compare English-to-Spanish translations from two computer programmes with two human-generated translations. As expected, the results show that the computer translations were much faster but less accurate. However, the tradeoff in speed vs. accuracy might allow computers to be used for a rough, first pass, while more expensive, and time-consuming human translation can be used for more critical text.

Keywords: machine translation; natural language processing; English to Spanish; automatic translation; computer-based translations; online translation; speed; accuracy.

DOI: 10.1504/IJIOME.2007.015284

International Journal of Information and Operations Management Education, 2007 Vol.2 No.2, pp.194 - 210

Published online: 01 Oct 2007 *

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