With machine translation back and forth translating is a simple game for searching funny translation mistakes. While it is a great way to have some fun, back translation is also often used for quality verification for both machine and human translations. There are some points behind this habit: it is a simple and easy way for translation project managers to control and monitor the translation work when they don’t understand the target language. Nonetheless, the unfortunate fact is that it actually tells very little about the translation quality.

Back translating means that first the original text (in language A) is translated to another language (language B) and after that the translation (in language B) is translated back to the original language (language A). Quickly thinking this may seem a good way to see how good the translation is. The common perception is that a correct translation should be exactly the same as the original text but only written with a different language. More.

See: Multilizer