Machine translation and human translation in competition

Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates the use of software to translate text or speech from one natural language to another.
On a basic level, MT performs simple substitution of words in one natural language for words in another, but that alone usually cannot produce a good translation of a text, because recognition of whole phrases and their closest counterparts in the target language is needed. Solving this problem with corpus and statistical techniques is a rapidly growing field that is leading to better translations, handling differences in linguistic typology, translation of idioms, and the isolation of anomalies.