Round-trip Translation - Inaccuracies

Inaccuracies

In as much as translation between two distinct, living languages is never an exact science, the current state of computer translation tools makes this more evident. Small glitches in the translation can easily be exploited in repetition, becoming more pronounced as errors pass from one language to another. As one website explains it, "translation software is almost good enough to turn grammatically correct, slang-free text from one language into grammatically incorrect, barely readable approximations in another. But the software is not equipped for 10 consecutive translations of the same piece of text. The resulting half-English, half-foreign, and totally non sequitur response bears almost no resemblance to the original. Remember the old game of 'Telephone'? Something is lost, and sometimes something is gained."