Machine translation in its present computerized form has been around since the 1960s. Despite fortunes of money invested in this field, much of it by government agencies in various countries, quality remained poor until the mid 2000s. For years, machine translation was the subject of countless jokes about silly translations.

This started to change in recent years with the advent of Statistical Machine Translation. Quality began to improve as more and more commercial companies started to develop practical and commercial uses for machine translation. This includes some of the largest companies in the technology sector like IBM, Microsoft and Google.

The advances in the availability and quality of machine translation brought about a new approach to translation: post-editing machine translation. Using this technique, a first draft of the translation is obtained using machine translation. The machine translation is then edited by a human translator to remove mistranslations, writing and grammar errors which may have occurred. The end result is a high quality translation which is comparable to professional translation.

The advantages of using this post-editing technique are time and cost savings. Human translators can spend less time on the translation, since a computer does some of the work, and the work costs less money.

The GTS Website Translator is based on a post-editing machine translation workflow. To see how it works, access the home page, enter a web page URL and click ‘Try it Free.’ The first draft web page translation is displayed in seconds in the GTS Translation editor. Just click on any text to post-edit it. Once the post-editing is done, the web page can be saved and posted to your public HTML server.