What are the common misconceptions about MT?

There are many misconceptions about machine translation. Some come from the experience that people have had historical legacy machine translation products and tools. Others come from translators that do not yet fully understand the technology and are afraid that machine translation threatens to replace them. Some of the common misconceptions are listed below. All are FALSE.

• Machine translation will be useful in the future, but we’re not there yet.
• Machine translation quality is so bad, that any translations done by machine are useless.
• It is faster to translate by hand than to edit machine tranlation output.
• Machine Translation will replace human translators.
• Anybody with a PC and a browser can download Moses and build an MT engine.
• General Purpose “Free” Online machine translation is the same as carefully built custom machine translation engines.
• Instant machine translation Solutions are the same at carefully customized engines.
• Rules-based machine translation is better than Statistical machine translation or vice versa.