Google Translate Serbian Tool - If Human Translators Be Careful?

So this will be the first in what is planned to be a series of articles looking at automatic and machine translation, both in the context of Serbian-English translation and of translation in general. In this article we will look briefly at the quality of Google's automatic Serbian-English translation and explain why we do not think translators and translation companies working in the Serbian-English pair should be too concerned for their livelihoods right now.

An example of Google's Serbian English translation

Let's carry out a little experiment first. We took a paragraph of Serbian text (taken from a Serbian Wikipedia article) and pasted it into the Google Serbian-English translation tool.

A human translation from the Serbian to English would read something like this:

A translation memory is comprised of segments of text in the source language and of their translation into one or more target languages. These segments can be passages, paragraphs, sentences or phrases. Individual words are not handled by translation memories, these are dealt with by terminology bases. Research has shown that many companies using multilingual documents use translation memory-based systems.

Within a few seconds, Google Translate outputs the following translation into English:

Translation memory consists of segments of the text in the original language and their translation into one or more target languages. These segments can be passages, paragraphs, sentences or phrases. Individual words are not in the field of translation memory, but they deal with terminoloske database. Research shows that many companies have multilingual documentation systems used to translating memory.

Can you understand it? Apart from a few problems the translator had in identifying passive/active constructions and an unknown word, of course you can!