Study Finds Estonian Electronic Translation Lacking
A study by European Commission-backed group Meta-Net has found what users of Google Translate already know - that machine translation support for Estonian needs improvement.
In the group's white paper, Estonian was lumped in with 19 other European languages for whom electronic translation support was weak or non-existent.
Language technologies scientist Kadri Vider told ERR radio that the survey results for Estonian were comparable to those of Danish and Greek, though Estonian has far fewer speakers than those languages.
Vider said that the machine translation situation for Estonian was a lot better than that of Latvia and Lithuania, probably thanks to state support.
Finnish speech recognition applications surpassed those for Estonian, but other aspects were comparable between the two languages.
Robin Ilves