Machine Translation as the Future of International Online Communication

Abstract

American “ownership” of the World Wide Web is on the decline. In fact, two-thirds to three-fourths of Internet users are not native speakers of English. It thus does not require a leap of logic to imagine how many more non-U.S. users would buy from American e-commerce sites or even purchase American-manufactured products if they had access to translations of these e-commerce pages and technical documents in their native languages. The most oftcited reason for not providing content in other languages, however, is the sheer cost involved of first hiring a translator to translate the original content and then keeping material updated. This chapter examines uses of machine translation as a mechanism for addressing these linguistic needs.