Integrating on-line MT services into monolingual web-sites for dissemination purposes: an evaluation perspective

On-line machine translation (MT) services are becoming increasingly popular among Internet users. In particular, over the last few years there has been a dramatic increase in the number of monolingual web-sites that rely on Internet-based MT systems to disseminate their contents in a variety of languages, which seems to be one of the most interesting areas in the current use of MT technology. This paper is based on preliminary observations of these recent developments and reports on how on-line MT services are actually integrated into a sample of monolingual web-sites only available in English, attempting to evaluate the success of the strategies used to incorporate webbased MT technology for dissemination purposes. The discussion suggests in conclusion that the overall lack of a user-oriented approach and the limited consideration of issues of user-friendliness make the integration of on-line MT into the sample of monolingual web-sites largely ineffective.