Machine translation systems: quality and possible ways of use

The article considers two machine translation systems, PROMT and Google Translate, which work on different principles. PROMT works on the so-called "translation by the rules" principle. Google Translate uses the technology which is based on the statistics principle. The article presents the linguistic analysis of the quality of the translations of text fragments of various genres made from English into Russian by these systems. The most typical mistakes made by the systems are revealed, the possibilities and spheres of use are determined. The author reveals that the systems are not useful for translating texts which are full of compound and complex sentences. The programs work mainly on the phrase level and can be fruitfully used for translating texts of formal style, for example, technical documents, manuals, etc., which contain simple extended sentences and do not contain sentences with complex syntactic constructions. The author considers that professional translators can use these systems while working with certain text types; however, the translations made by the systems must be checked thoroughly and verified.