As we have noticed earlier, the quality of machine translation is mainly the task of its developers. However, the users can also make some efforts for reaching acceptable results because first of all the quality of machine translation directly depends on the quality of the delivered source text.
Certainly, the general guidelines on how to prepare the text for machine translation will not solve all problems of the machine translation, but using some simple tips, you can obtain better results.
The first guideline is Avoid misprints, spelling errors.
Bear in mind punctuation rules.
Although some of the machine translation engines use spell-on-the-fly to correct spelling errors, the punctuation rules must be observed by the users themselves.
There are times when we are in a hurry and don’t pay attention on punctuation marks, spaces and other common writing rules. We still rely on the machine translation’s cleverness, but we forget that even Google is not almighty.
Let’s see an example from Google Translate.
In these 2 sentences the spaces after the period are missing.
The translation from English to Russian (and to other languages as well) is not accurate, because the missing space after the period doesn’t allow Google to identify words correctly and translate. For some reason, Google doesn’t handle the case with missing spaces, which is very frequent among users of the online translation.
ImTranslator does a better job in recognizing this tricky case.
ImTranslator uses a pre-processing module to provide a normalization to all texts entered for translation.
As a result, all words get translated and the translation is accurate and usable.
