.NET Internationalization: The Developer’s Guide to Building Global Windows and Web Applications

9. Machine Translation

WHEN IBM PC DOS WAS FIRST TRANSLATED into French, the DOS error message “Out of environment space” was translated as the French equivalent of “There is no room in the garden.” I used to imagine French people looking forlornly out of the window thinking to themselves, “That may be true, but what’s wrong with my computer?” The translation industry and the tools that it spawns have made great advances in the last 20 years, but the pitfalls are still the same. In this chapter, we look at how we can use machine translation (MT)—translations performed by computers. We build a translation engine that we later use in Chapter 10, “Resource Administration,” to automatically translate resources and to add whole new languages to an ...