What is generic Machine Translation?

When a machine translation system has not been customized and is not specialized in a specific domain, this is commonly referred to as “Generic” machine translation. Google Translate, Microsoft Translator and other free public translation systems fall into this category. Generic machine translation can often be useful for getting a general meaning of a piece of text, but is prone to grammar, syntax and other errors.

Generic machine translation is not suitable for republishing content without considerable amounts of human editing. Many translators have been given generic translation output and asked to edit it for lower rates than normal translation. This has caused a number of issues in the translation industry, including giving machine translation as a whole a bad name. Some translators will even refuse to edit generic machine translation as it is often more work to edit than to fully translate the same text.

Because giant companies like Google and Microsoft offer generic machine translation, many mistakenly believe that the quality of translation is the best possible and state-of-the-art. A customized machine translation engine that has been expertly adapted for a purpose will deliver much greater quality translations and in many cases translated sentences will require little or no editing at all. Professional translators and enterprises should consider a customized machine translation solution in order to deliver quality translations.