Translated> Machine Translation can't even read e-mails? 20170927

I'm back from the Machine Translation Summit. I'm writing these blogs going through notes I took and conversations I had there.

I had lunch at a Japanese restaurant with people who presented at the event. At that time, one high-leveled machine translation researcher mentioned this. He was told by a Japanese client: "You're a machine translation expert, right? Then you should be able to read my e-mails if I write in Japanese". But he couldn't read the contents even with machine translation (this researcher cannot read Japanese).

It seems that however machine translation grows, it will take some time to even read contents of an e-mail even with machine translation.

I was not expecting this.