Can Machine Translation handle complex formatting?

The answer to this question depends on the machine translation platform being used. Language Studio handles complex formatting embedded in documents such as Microsoft Word, PowerPoint or standard XML interchange formats such as XLIFF or TMX.

Many machine translation tools and platforms cannot handle complex formatting. There is a common misconception that RBMT can handle formatting, but SMT cannot. This is totally false, but this myth continues to be perpetrated through the market by LSPs that have a vested interest in legacy RBMT tools and have not moved to more advanced and modern platforms.

Open source Moses does not handle complex formatting. Anyone adopting this platform needs to write their own software to manage complex formatting for manually reinsert the formatting after the translation is complete.

In addition to handling complex formatting, Language Studio also supports XML markup to guide quality and control the translations at runtime. This enables sections of documents to be translatated in a specific writing style, ignoring of some content and control over reordering. Language Studio even provides a JavaScript layer so that you can customize and control translations at runtime.