Gweiadur helps improve Microsoft Translator for Welsh

Recently, the Gweiadur team assisted Google by providing a lexicon and context in order to enable them to improve the results of Google Translate. In order to restore the balance, the team has also been assisting the Welsh Assembly as they worked with Microsoft to improve the results of Microsoft Translator!

 

Once again, the Assembly stressed that machine translation would not replace professional translators, but that it was a key component of providing a bilingual service and would be of benefit to those translators in their work.

 

How similar will the results of the two systems be, and will one prove itself more reliable than the other?

 

Only time will tell how good the quality of the suggested translations will be when negotiating with the real-world every-day requirements of its users, and whether or not raising the profile and status of machine translation in this way will give people more confidence in copying and pasting unverified translations blindly into their public copy. It would be a great shame if all the bustle and attention surrounding improving Welsh machine translation at the moment were to result in a reduction in the quality of our public signs and documents.