One of the tendencies in translation business is putting too much faith in translating machines and too little faith in the best reference resource, native language speakers. That the best translation programs may still mangle 20 to 30 percent of a text is no reason to abandon machines altogether. Take advantage of what they’re good at: translating obscure terms and speedily producing rough-draft renditions of sentences, paragraphs and bigger chunks of text. The tricky part comes once the machine is through, of course: you have to separate the wheat from the chaff – that is, отделить пшеницу от мякины, according to the Russian translation quickly found using Yahoo’s free Babel Fish translator.

As a well-known phrase with Biblical roots, “wheat from chaff” wasn’t much of a challenge for the program – and was easy  to back-check. But what about the Russian-to-English rendering of an everyday, highly idiomatic phrase, the kind a machine might easily mess up – like “Как ты меня достал!”, for example, which should come out “I’ve had it with you!”, “Enough already!” or something similar?

Babel Fish renders it “As you reached me!”, alas – but how can a Russian speaker quickly determine that this is off base? In this case apply another “program”: native English speakers or bilingual translators.

Cross-checking must be done judiciously, of course, as many cases are quite subtle or tricky.

All right, machines can do wonders for your translation powers if you check your expectations and back-check your results.

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