I'm sure that you've heard the old language teaching will be obsolete in 20 years line. A Star Trek-like universal translator will make interpersonal communication between people who speak different languages easy.
Of course the problem has been that machine translations have trouble with many aspects of language. You have to program so many language nuances into a machine (for exmaple "he's a heavy smoker" - what does heavy mean in that sentence?).
Here's an online translator, but the translation is still done by real people. I typed in "Hi, my name is Jim." I know it's a stupid test... and said I wanted to translate from English to Korea. The price:
Text Translation by Non-Native translators 0.30 USD
Text Translation by Native translators 0.40 USD
Text Translation by Professional translators 0.50 USD
A longer text (the rules for the travel writing contest I blogged about a while back) would be:
Text Translation by Non-Native translators 6.96 USD
Text Translation by Native translators 9.28 USD
Text Translation by Professional translators 11.60 USD
That is inexpensive! They also have a free machine translation service available online. Of course they have to warn you "Free translation is machine translated text and should only be used an indication as to the meaning of the orginal text."
NonNative - People who are fluent in a language pair but do not have certification and are not a native speaker of that language.
Native - People who are fluent in a language pair AND are a native speaker in that language pair
Professional - People who have had at least 5 years industry experience in that language pair
Anyway, it should be a usefule site so check it out when you need some translating done.
Posted by James Trotta at April 1, 2006 6:29 PMESL blog is one of many Blogs for learning English & teaching English. Translation services information.