Machine translation - getting better, still expensive. about: <http://www.languageweaver.com/how_it_works.php> Chinese: <http://www.languageweaver.com/language-translation-for-chinese.php>
I have not seen their Chinese translation (subject of the thread) but have seen them translate Arabic (Al Jazeera) on the fly with expert Arabic speakers who confirmed that the translation is high quality. The Chinese may be as good or it may not.
>Me: Czechs HAVE TO be interested in the outside world. The Czech
>Republic is a tiny country surrounded by other countries in a hugely
>mulilinguistic environment, whereas Russia is a giant empire several
>times the size of Europe. It takes the Trans-Siberian train 2 weeks
>to get from Moscow to Vladivostok, and during all that voyage you
>will encounter only Russian-speakers. In Europe, if you travel a few
>hours, you're in a whole other country. (I think the fact that
>Russia had closed borders for 70 years is also a factor in Russian
>solipsism.)
ISTR that when the empire disintegrated and Ukraine mandated that Univ. of Kiev would teach all classes in Ukrainian instead of Russian. The problem was the professors (mostly Ukrainian) did not speak Ukrainian well enough to teach in it.