It is fair to say that the quality of translations generated by the free Google Translate machine translation service has come a long way in the last few years, so much so that many professional translators and freelancers consider it as a useful and even reliable resource when working on their translation projects. But to what extent can it be used with great confidence? This article will highlight some of the benefits and the limitations of using Google Translate for both personal and professional use, and the situations in which using the tool should be either avoided or at least approached with great caution.

The inability of Google Translate, Bing Translator, Baidu Fanyi, and other translation services to correctly convert jī nián dàjí 鸡年大吉 (“may the / your year of the chicken be greatly auspicious!”) into various languages raises a vital point that we have long wanted to make, and now seems the perfect moment to do so. Chinese characters for machine translation, how does it work?

As some of you will know,  Facebook has a feature that enables public content from any page on its platform to be translated into the user’s chosen language. Up until 2015 this feature was powered by the Bing Translator engine. Despite it being available on Facebook and other social media such as Twitter for around five years, users continued to report major issues regarding the accuracy of these translations. Facebook has since implemented its own machine learning translation system. Is progress being made? Let’s find out!