A Case Study of Machine Translation: Problems and Suggestions

For past decades, machine translation has made a great achievement and contribution though the process is not so smooth (Zhang, 2007). Many machine translation systems have been developed and put into use and many people especially learners turn to them when faced with a translation task. A question appears—is translation produced by these translation systems or software satisfactory? In this paper, the author applies machine translation software products developed by different companies to song lyric translation. The result is far from being satisfactory. A detailed discussion is provided to account for it. It shows that machine translation still has great space to improve. Based on this case study, the author puts forward some advice on how to make a good use of machine translation to ensure the quality of machine translation.