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Common Sense Advisory Blogs
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San Francisco's Machine-Translated Website in the News Again
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A San Francisco ordinance mandates that the city provide information in several languages besides English. Last October we reviewed San Francisco's machine-translated website. We recommended improving its usability by alerting foreign language users -- in their language -- to flaws in the translation.
SF mayor Gavin Newsom, best known for his commitment to marriage rights, agreed that something needed to be done to ensure information access for the linguistic minorities in his city. He established a Cultural Competency Task Force to review the website's 50,000 pages à la Systran and Google. The committee concluded that some sections were, in his own words, "complete gobbledygook, complete nonsense, gibberish, an embarrassment if ever there was one." Now the city is bringing in real-life translators to make up for the deficiencies of the program.
But we don't think the city should drop MT completely. Instead, we recommend a thorough, continuing analysis of the site's traffic and usage. The resulting data could help city planners combine human and automated translation as they identify highly trafficked pages of the site, re-use previously translated material, and offer the MT option for less frequently traversed content. In the long term it would save a lot of taxpayer's money and -- most importantly -- reduce the time to publish content, a shortcoming of using only human translators. This option is especially important for sites with a limited budget to translate enormous amounts of content.
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