10th January 2006, 1 min read

State-of-the-art in automated translation

Véronis compares Systran and Reverso, two popular automated translation tools.

In order to compare them, I take a sentence in English, have it translated in French, and then back. This has the benefit that even if you don’t read French, you can appreciate the quality of the tool.

I start with this sentence:

I gave John a piece of my mind.

Systran gives me:

J’ai donné Ã John par morceau de mon esprit.

and back:

I gave to John per piece of my spirit.

Whereas Reverso gives me

J’ai donné Ã John un morceau de mon avis(esprit).

and back,

I gave to John a piece of my opinion (spirit).

I think Reverso is better here. Note that most search engines out there use Systran.