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The current sophistication of translation software makes it more difficult and
time consuming to use it than to hire a professional to translate from
scratch--since you have to hire the professional to fix it, anyway, and it
takes just as long, or longer.
If you are interested in factual research, check out "natural language
processing" as a subject area in electronic/software/engineering journals.
If you are interested in my opinion: I bought my husband some French trans-
lation software for his birthday. He has a Bacholor's degree in French, and
he was appalled by its performance. Even the documentation that came with it
admitted it only did about 60%--to say nothing of plenty of mis-translations
that were extremely funny (but which I can't remember, so don't ask!)
