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Recent years have brought us many advances in computer technology, both in hardware and in software.  Some of the tools now on the marketplace would have almost been inconceivable a few years back, and now they are readily available and affordable to almost everybody.
Some software, in particular, has evolved in leaps and bounds during recent times, with voice recognition, translation and facial recognition being some of the areas which have seen the biggest advancement.  There is a free translation service available on the Internet today, as well as many other advanced commercial translation packages on the market as well.  Whether you need to translate from English to German, or from Spanish to Chinese – there is some software out there that can accommodate your needs.

English translation (Englisch Übersetzung) is not without its difficulties, and as with most other languages, there is a very small margin of error. Translation is defined as an interpretation of the meaning of a text, and the subsequent production of a related text in another language. This movement from the source text to the target language text is never without its difficulties, however, some language combinations do throw up more problems than others. The job of translation must take many things into consideration, including the context of the source material, the grammar of the two languages, the writing conventions and the idioms of the respective languages. It is never as simple as finding the word-for-word correspondence between the two languages, because this situation simply never exists. All languages develop independently of each other, and it is up to the individual translator – or translation software – to create the necessary correspondence.

Machine translation is the process where a computer application makes an initial analysis of the source text and creates a text in the target language, without any human intervention. Machine translation software like Yahoo’s Babel Fish, Babylon, and StarDict are available for translation German English (translation German English (Übersetzung Deutsch Englisch) ), as well as between a multitude of other languages. Perfect machine translation is still a goal of natural language computer processing that may never be obtained, however, it is getting to a stage in its evolution where it is available, usable and for the most part – comprehensible.

While we may be a long way from being able to rely on unedited machine translation for German to English translation, it is good to have software that can do some of this work for us. Language is and always will be driven by its context – meaning that a human or artificial intelligence that does not currently exist – will be necessary for the editing, comprehension and re-contextualisation of the source text. The art and science of translation is almost as old as language itself. We have reached a stage today where a computer running standard Windows software can translate into a multitude of languages, including English and German. While the automation of these age old translation procedures is far from perfect, it is amazing that such software exists and is available for us all to use.