Isabella Massardo links to a BBC news article on the problems of machine translation. It starts out from the story about the pulped brochure for Homberg an der Efze reported here a month ago.

The article is a reasoned explanation of why machine translation works for some purposes and not for others. It is followed by a number of comments, which tend to churn out the old chestnuts (‘out of sight, out of mind’ rendered as ‘invisible idiot’). It seems a bit difficult to think seriously about translation with this trivialization.

A Sabine Reul of Textbüro Reul translators is quoted.