Multiple time zones was an issue for SharePoint, but you could schedule it in such a way that it was least busy where the load is at the most appropriate time in your case.
Those were great improvements.
In 2013, it was improved some more by having a little more control over what propagates and when by propagating not just pages but documents, lists and lots of things. Variations only works on publication templates but there use to be lots things that simply did not propagate.
2013 machine translation service is a direct line to something which is very similar to the bing translator. It is available in variations and also available in the managed metadata service. You can press a button, send it out to translation and it comes back. There is also something for programmers so they can extend that capability besides those two options.
The Multilingual user interface for SharePoint required Microsoft to have people translate every message and button so that's why it took a while to see the language and service packs arrive.
When you wanted your own content translated and metadata and pages this gave you the ability to try the translation using Microsoft's internal translation services. Machine translation service is something that will take things and send them to Bing or a relative of Bing. The quality is the same as you would get with Bing which is both good and bad. It can be scary if you are running multilingual sites because you know it is going to be making mistakes and you can't verify the response of the automatic translation.
Given that Bing is trying to be all things to all people and it is offering generally a free service, it only goes so far, it doesn't use everything that current technology allows because that would make it too slow and they couldn't provide it for free and there are some languages for which there is not much market demand for and therefore the quality isn't going to be that good.
Within SharePoint, you only have one option; send it to Bing and it doesn't have the ability for you to improve translations and tell it that it is doing something wrong and have it do it correctly the next time. You can manually go in and correct those translations.
Human translators will use machine translation to see what it looks like but there tools are a lot more flexible than what you get with sharpening and they're set up to correct mistakes and SharePoint is not nicely set up to correct mistakes.
This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers.