Although authomatic machine translators have many advantages, they are not useful if we ant to translate into Spanish a text written in German, for example. The reason is that these two languages are very different: the grammar, the vocabulary, the sense of the sentences etc. have nothing to do with our way of writting. In this case, the MT would make a lot of mistakes, and some of them can be the following:

1. Grammatic errors: as we can see in the sentence La construcción de torre a Babel es una narración bíblica conocida del Testamento Viejo, there is a grammatical error. In Spanish, construcción de must be followed by a noun and its article. As we can see, this is just one of the thounsands of differences that must be between German and Spanish.
2. Nonsense sentences: each language has its own order of sentences, and these two languages have no similarities in this aspect, as we can see in Consideran el acontecimiento|evento de la confusión de idioma sin embargo la mayor parte no para histórico, sino para mític. The sentence is nor coherent neither logical. The elements are in a wrong place in the sentence, and it is clear that the machine has translated it literally.
3. Genre errors: Desde 1913 está ocupado por hallazgos arqueológicos que la historia se refiera a una torre histórica. This sentence refers to the Babel tower, which is feminine in Spanish. In German it is not, and the MT has translated it literally once again.
4. Lexic errors: La biblia habla de un pueblo del este que habla un idioma y se establece en el nivel|llanura en un país con nombre de Schin. In this case, the authomatic translator does not know which term to choose. Depending on the word, the sentence can completely lose its sense, so it is essential to use the correct term in order to build a correct sentence.
5. Spelling errors: Ahora teme que no les parece “nada más de forma inalcanzable” qué se pueden proponer también, o como se modificaría hoy quizá que el pueblo se podría hacer megalómano. Here, apart from the incorrect use of the verbs - in Spanish the verb temer is followed by subjunctive - the spelling is incorrect. We must make a difference between que/qué and como/cómo, since they have quite different meanings.

As a conclusion, we can mention that MTs may not be useful to translate texts written in a languages that are very different from ours. They may be used for little translations, but that is all.

Sources:

• Torre de Babel (Deutsch). (2008). Comprendum Translator. Retrieved: 14:36, April 23, from http://www.translendium.net:8080/home/

• Torre de Babel (Deutsch). (2008). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved: 13:51, April 21, from http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turmbau_zu_Babel

• Torre de Babel (Español). (2008). Comprendum Translator. Retrieved: 13:57, April 21, from http://www.translendium.net:8080/home/url.do;jsessionid=CAA572C7E1E362D3E3D2

Authomatic translators have many advantages, but sometimes, theu may not be the best choice to make a grammatically syntactically correct translation. As an exaple of this can be mentioned the followings.

1. Agreement errors: If we translate a text from Wikipedia (Catalonian-Spanish), we can find errors like this: “La torre de Babel fue, según la Bíblia^[1], un gran proyecto de los hombres para construir una ciudad en vertical en Babel, la tierra de xinar que emprendieron a los hombres después del gran diluvio universal”. The sentence is incorrect. It should be (…) “que emprendieron los hombres”.
2. Spelling errors: in the sentence “Babel viene de la palabra Accadi Bb-ili (La puerta de Dios), donde|dónde Bb quiere decir puerta y il dios” we can see that the authomatic translator is not able to make a difference between donde and dónde. In plus, we must consider that this punctuation mistake can change completely the sense of the sentence.
3. Grammar errors: “Estos hombres eran pues, los descendientes de Noè y representaban la humanidad hablando de una única lengua” shows a very clear example of the differences between these two languages. In Spanish, hablando de refers to the topic someone has been talking about. If we ant to specify something, we do not put a preposition.
4. Vocabulary errors: “Como el corazón|coro de los hombres era desobediente y malvado, y en vez de adorar a Dios se preocupaban sólo por ellos mismos, Dios, con el fin de frustar este proyecto, multiplicó el número de (…)”. In this case, there is a severe vocabulary mistake. In Spanish, the expression “frustrar un proyecto” does not exist. The tranbslator should consider other meanings of the word.
5. Punctuation errors: “multiplicó el número de lenguas porque así no se podrían comprender entre ellos y por lo tanto, no tener que detener la construcción de la ciudad”. This sentence has a punctuation mistake. Adverbs like “por lo tanto” must be placed between two commas.

As we can see, an authomatic translator machine can be quite useful in some occasions, but we can not trust them if we want to have a completely correct and proper translation. We must not forget that each language has its characteristics, no matter how similar they are, as happens in the case of Spanish and Catalonian.

Sources:

• Torre de Babel (Catalá). (2008). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved: 13:51, April 21, from http://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torre_de_Babel
• Torre de Babel (Español). (2008). Comprendum Translator. Retrieved: 13:57, April 21, from http://www.translendium.net:8080/home/url.do;jsessionid=CAA572C7E1E362D3E3D2952A2113BCC7
• Torre de Babel (Catalá). (2008). Comprendum Translator. Retrieved: 21:57, April 21, from  http://www.translendium.net:8080/home/

The world of translation has an specific vocabulary which would be very useful to know in order to understand the most important concepts of this world. Some of these concepts are the following:

• Machine Translation: according to the Wikipedia, is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates the use of computer software to translate text or speech from one natural language to another. At its basic level, MT performs simple substitution of words in one natural language for words in another. Using corpus techniques, more complex translations may be attempted, allowing for better handling of differences in linguistic typology, phrase recognition, and translation of idioms, as well as the isolation of anomalies. Improved output quality can also be achieved by human intervention: for example, some systems are able to translate more accurately if the user has unambiguously identified which words in the text are names. With the assistance of these techniques, MT has proven useful as a tool to assist human translators, and in some cases can even produce output that can be used “as is”. However, current systems are unable to produce output of the same quality as a human translator, particularly where the text to be translated uses casual language.
• Computer-assisted translation: or CAT is a form of translation wherein a human translator translates texts using computer software designed to support and facilitate the translation process. Computer-assisted translation is sometimes called machine-assisted, or machine-aided, translation. Some advanced computer-assisted translation solutions include controlled machine translation (MT). Integration of MT into computer-assisted translation has been implemented in various ways by various parties.
• Multilingual content management: a multilingual website is usually a mixture of global and local content. Local content presents no particular content management issues; global content - which has to be translated across all language locales - does. Deciding where multiple language versions of content are going to be required and where content can be maintained separately for different locales is a critical decision that will affect how a site should be maintained and what it will cost.
• Translation technology: translation is the action of interpretation of the meaning of a text, and subsequent production of an equivalent text, also called a translation, that communicates the same message in another language. The text to be translated is called the “source text,” and the language it is to be translated into is called the “target language“; the final product is sometimes called the “target text.”

Sources:

• Machine Translation. (2008, May 5). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved: 11:03, April 15, 2008 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_translation

• Computer-assited Translation. (2008, May 2). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved: 15:11, April 15, 2008 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-assisted_translation

• Multilingual Conrtent anagement. In Kitside. Retrieved: 22:59, April 15, 2008 from http://www.kitsite.com/articles/multilingual-content-management.html

• Translation Technology. (2008, May 4). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved: 22:44, April 15, 2008 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translation_technology