The Massachusets Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) has started using Systran Machine Translation technology to provide its website (http://www.mbta.com) in 14 languages including Arabic, German, Portuguese, traditional and simplified Chinese, Dutch, Greek, Japanese, Italian, French, Spanish, Swedish, Russian, and Korean.
The MBTA did not localize its website, which is visited by an estimated 11 Million people anually, using human translation. According to their spokesman, they did not use human translation due to the high costs involved, and preferred the cheaper MT alternative despite its recognized shortcomings. Upon review of the website, it is evident that the MBTA took the cheapskate approach to the max and provided foreign language website versions of questionable value. Key website graphics, such as buttons, are not translated. Secondary drop-down menu options are also left untranslated. And the foreign pages are not cached on the MBTA website, which means that search engines have no way of finding the MBTA content in any language other than English. When you add the fact that train station and street names which have English names may be translated into incoherent phrases, one may ask why the MBTA made the effort to translate its website in the first place.
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