Online translation breaks language barriers Science DW.COM 20.12.2012

The Internet connects the world, but most people are walled off from each other by language barriers. So free online machine translators like Google Translate, Microsoft's Bing and Systran are a godsend. More than 200 million global users click onto Google Translate alone every month, according to Franz Josef Och, who heads the search engine's machine translation group. "Most of the translation on the planet is now done by Google Translate," he wrote on the company's blog earlier this year. Still, Och has no illusions about the challenges of producing readable machine-translated text.