Everyone who’s used a machine translation app like Google Translate, Babylon, Jibbigo or iLingual will have experienced the thrill: the first time you copy-paste text in a previously unfathomable language and it translates it, instantly.
It’s intoxicating, and a little bit ‘Brave New World’, but along with that futuristic thrill comes a harsh reality. A machine translation app may be able to give you the gist of a piece of foreign language text – or even a very clear, literal translation – but it can’t compete with the delicacy and local knowledge of content translated by a human.
That being said, machine translation engines are becoming more and more sophisticated all the time, allowing for high-speed multilingual online communication.
Read more: Information Age