What is a realistic expectation for using machine translation for global business and communications?

One should not expect perfect translation using Transclick. Yet, with web sites becoming increasingly multi-lingual and dynamic, machine translation is fast becoming an essential technology for globalizing a web site. If you need to book a flight as a non-English speaker, you or your local travel agent may need to translate the Sabre data base of Travelocity.com from English to a local language, by the time you find a human translator and translate the booking availability, your cheap flight has been booked by someone else using Transclick!

So for English e-commerce and info-mediary web sites trying to reach a global market (over 50% of internet users in 2000 do not use English over the internet), you have no choice---you must exploit the real advantages of machine translation since they more than outweigh the real disadvantages.