Machine translation refers to fully automated software that can translate source text content into target languages. Humans may use machine translation to translate text and speech into another language, or machine translation may be carried out with no human intervention. Translation companies use machine translation to increase the productivity of translators and reduce costs.

Traditional machine translation

Traditional machine translation refers to platforms such as Google Translate, Bing, Yandex and Naver. These platforms allow fast automatic translation for millions of users. Companies can also provide these types of systems to perform pre-translation using them and connect them to their own systems through a software interface or API.

Custom machine translation

Custom machine translation refers to machine translation software that has a core component and can be improved to increase the accuracy of translating terms in a certain field (e.g., medicine). For example, the WIPO as a specialized translation engine translates the patent more accurately than a traditional machine translation.

Adaptive machine translation

Adaptive machine translation refers to the suggestions that are made to translators while translating into a computer-assisted translation tool and is constantly enriched by translator inputs to the program. Introduced in 2016 by Light and in 2017 by Trados, the software greatly enhances translator performance and could challenge translation memory technology in the future.

There are more than a hundred machine translation software providers in the world, some of which are exclusively machine translation developers and some are translation companies and IT giants.

Source: Trados website