Users
Home users
Automatically translate web pages
Translate chat
Organizational users (companies, government)
Classifying documents as “needing human translation” or “not”; estimating effort needed for translation
Localization support [e.g. for instruction manuals]
Translation of email, documents, reports etc.
Professional users (translators)
Support tools for translators who do post-editing
Unclassified
1. Spoken language translation (where is it used?)
Languages
From European languages to Chinese/Japanese/Arabic and vice versa.
From one European language to another
Other languages include - Korean
Comment
In general, even the best MT systems in use today are mainly useful to get a general idea/gist of the text. Grammar and preservation of meaning can not be guaranteed. The main use cases for such limited functionality could be -
Automatic translation of websites, but only where the objective is doing something on the website [e.g. booking tickets/hotel rooms, shopping for goods which shoppers already know about], or getting some information. It is not suited for reading articles or literary works. The sentences should be small (and hence easier to translate). [e.g. titles of menus, small descriptions of the services offered by the site etc., news snippets]
Tools that assist human translators [e.g. localization support tools].
Chatting
Online service for naive users – for applications similar to the above, except that the text is in some other system where there is no translation feature provided [e.g. where the chat client does not provide translation].
Applications of MT system components
Spell-check, grammar-check
Dictionary/thesaurus – mono and bi-lingual
Multi-lingual search (thematic search, query translation)
Applications where MT is a component
Speech translation
OCR
