Babelshark

We all know the limitations of Babelfish. And for someone who knows nothing about the target language, I'm afraid this proposal is unlikely to help. But if you have some working knowledge of the target language, and would like help in converting the clumsy first pass result into something more accurate and idiomatically natural, I propose the following:

Solicit from publishers the electronic texts of a well-chosen selection of books that have recently been published in multiple languages. These translations will have been done by real human experts, and the translations will be as accurate and idiomatic as you hope your ultimate translation will be.

Now when you do the automated translation of your text, you start with the conventional Babelfish-style approach for the first pass. For the second, advanced pass, you highlight areas that were idiomatic in the original, and are thus likely to be wrong in the translation, and since you know something about the target language, you can highlight sections of the first-pass translation that seem suspect to you, even if you dont know what's right. After highlighting the suspect sections, the software parses the text from the book translations to find passages that correspond to the selection in your untranslated text, and then proposes the corresponding phrase in the book translation. You'd be offered the option of seeing the book passage containing the phrase, to judge its appropriateness in context. Again, knowing enough about the target language, you could in most cases determine whether the suggested changes would improve the translation, and either accept the proposed change or ask for another proposal from the translation engine.

The company offering the automated translation service would have to assure the publishers that the book texts would never be made available as entire books, or even in blocks of more than, say, twenty words at a time. And they'd probably have to offer some small fee for the book files, or offer advertisements for the books on the translation site. But since the translations are already done, and worth nothing now to publishers once the book is published, and are already in electronic form, it should cost very little to build a fairly comprehensive database of reliable idiomatic and somewhat context-sensitive translations.

For even better results, perhaps the user could be given the choice to filter the types of books searched (e.g., business texts rather than romance novels, books written in the last two years rather than in the last twenty years, etc.).

I'm not really sure how effective this would be, but surely it would offer some improvement. I am fairly sure it would still be less than ideal, but then, I didn't name it Babelporpoise, either.