Online translators compared

[undyingking]

As a follow-up to this post of the other week about Google Translate, here's an interesting study comparing the results of Google, Babelfish and Bing translation to and from various languages.

The conclusions:

• Google is uniformly preferred for longer text samples;
• You might think Google's statistical approach would be strongest for commonest-translated (ie. Western European) languages, but no;
• Old-school rules-based translation seemed to work best for Far Eastern languages;
• Shorter lengths uniformly weaken the preference for Google;
• The preferred translator for A->B is not always preferred for B->A.
  

Edit: changed "now" to "not" in last sentence. Oops.