SDL, the leading provider of Global Information Management solutions today announced the results of its latest survey on machine translation. The survey in conjunction with the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA) and the European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT) ended in January 2010. For the first time, the latest survey included additional questions on using automated translation with human post-editing.

This was the second time that the survey was conducted, enabling a comparison with the previous survey, to produce year-on-year trends. This survey was completed by 228 individuals of managerial level in global business.

Highlights of this year’s survey results include:

• Over a quarter (28%) of respondents are either using or plan to use automated translation (a 5% increase on 2008)

• The main barrier to adoption is still concerns over quality (75%)

• Respondents continue to perceive the main benefits of automated translation as time and cost reductions

• 57% of respondents said they are more likely to adopt automated translation as a result of human-post editing because of the improved quality it delivers.

“There’s a definite trend towards companies planning on using automated translation and human post-editing in the coming years,” said Alan Sloan, CEO of SDL’s Language Technologies division. “It is SDL’s belief that automated translation technology has a key role to play in the commercial world as part of a wider and integrated environment for translation. Meanwhile automated translation with human post-editing is going to increasingly take over from pure human translation for certain content types.”

SDL invested in machine translation in 2001 and launched its Knowledge-based Translation System in 2004. SDL publishes over 7 billion words of content through its automated translation systems every year . A 300 strong team of computational linguists, project managers and post-editors has been human post-editing machine translation for global clients for over 6 years. SDL sees the success of machine translation as being through its integration in the translation process. SDL integrates machine translation technology with consulting services, desktop translation memory and enterprise translation management systems in hosted, on-premise or SaaS environments to suit the needs of global business.

For the full results of the SDL Automated Translation Survey, and a recorded webinar summary please go to http://www.sdl.com/machine_translation_survey/