Everybody has read stories of translation nightmares before, where large companies made a huge goof in translation to the laughter and merriment of audiences. Some examples can be found in http://moronland.net/moronia/moron/1064/.
Now, another joke can be told thanks to Google's translation tool. One of our clients in Germany has an office at An der Halde 20 in a certain German city. Google's translation of the street address? At the Dump 20.
Joking aside however, this example calls to point one of the problems with Google's statistical machine translation tool. This tool features high accuracy, but there is no way for the individual user to tell the tool not to translate street addresses. So when a street address contains translatable words, the tool will translate them as regular words. In a rule-based machine translation system, such as the one used by Global Translations, street addresses can be flagged as DNT (do not translate) and the translation tool will not translate them.
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