Chinese to English translation is technically very hard (I've worked on an open source translation engine -> http://adsotrans.com/downloads http://adsotrans.com

Chinese to English translation is technically very hard (I've worked on an open source translation engine -> http://adsotrans.com/downloads http://adsotrans.com/downloads). While there are definitely lots of easy ways that Google can improve its translation (introducing a rules-based pre-processor to stop it from screwing up names and numbers would be a good start), it's worth remembering that Google is the start-up when it comes to machine translation. They lured Franz Och (author of GIZA++) away from academia and gave him the computing power to single-handedly crush everyone working on MT in the government-academia complex and in DOD funded companies like Language Weaver. In response, NIST changed the competition rules to penalize Google for not using NIST data. Google needs to improve its Chinese-English machine translation for the same reason it needs to keep working on Chinese -- you can't organize the world's information if you don't understand its largest language. But the underlying problem is that Google isn't engaging with China and doesn't seem capable of hiring people who actually straddle both worlds. Not that it hasn't followed Systran down the rules-based path. Realistically, I don't see any other company out there which is making the sort of progress that they are in MT. The fact they are still wrong on occasion when tackling distant language pairs seems more a result of their being held back by a universal architecture for developing MT systems, not because they need to go back to an exclusively rules-based system. The future is hybrid anyway.