LinguaWeb - Tools to translate from English to Bahasa Melayu

While having my breakfast last new year holiday, I managed to watch the "Malaysia Hari Ini", a morning TV show program by TV3. One of the segment featuring a local IT company, Linguamatix Sdn. Bhd. with their product called LinguaWeb. Basically it's web based translation tool that translate from English to Bahasa Melayu. Wow we don't see any new innovation from our local company recently, do we? So I decided to take a look. When I entered my blog url and hit the "terjemah" button, I cracked.

My entry on YouSendIt and DropSend was like ....

Not long ago Gerg asked me "How on earth I'm going to send 50Mb attachment email without breaking it up into pieces?"

Translated into

Tidak lama dahulu Gerg menyuruh saya "Bagaimana di bumi saya akan menghantar perlekatan 50Mb emel tanpa memecahkan ia atas terbelah?"

Despite the speedy respond on the application side, the translation engine still doesn't really make any sense. The translation is done word per word and not according to its context. But if you look at the footer, the disclaimer warned that this translation tool is just to give a basic idea to the user. This is the same issue haunted me few years ago. There is no translation engine better than the human itself.

However if we look at the bright side, maybe Linguamatix has a plan to sell the library to Altavista's BabelFish. Or perhaps the Text Translation mode can be very useful for student or professional.