Machine translation is funny. How funny? This funny. The fact that so many hilarious examples of it are visible around the world, in so many contexts – street signs, menus, product packaging, and more – shows that a wide range of enterprises have relied on it for a long time. They’ve done so because machine translation is as fast and cheap as traditional, human translation is slow and costly. If you want to be first to market, if you want to catch a wave of tourists, if you need something translated ASAP, you can’t tolerate cycles of review.
