Who is going to win the machine translation battle?

I've been reading some blogs by John Yunker about machine translation. It seems that competition in the business is tough. Google are famous and have a free translation service, Facebook are having their site translated into many, many languages and of course there might be some more famous or less famous companies on the market. Up till now Google are the best. Or at least they are considered the best. They are widely known, used and trusted. And they offer free translation.

Having a competitor like G is not easy especially when you want to make money from machine translation services. Most of us know that machine translation does not give us the expected good result. Of course some services are a bit better than others but are way from perfect.

The main competition now is between google translate and babelfish. According to me -there is no difference. The choice depends on whether you prefer google or yahoo!.

Is this why some other companies claim to have a lot more services? This guy whom I mention at the beginning made me make a research about the companies which develop such translation services. I read a lot about Transclick. These have mainly focused on mobile translation but they claim to have services for translation of blogs, webpages, etc. As a matter of fact I didn't find any of these service except for TransFox. I can't say if the service is good or bad because the flash demo did not work and the link for download did not work...For this reason I am going to exclude this company from the list of possible competitors in the field of MT. The only thing that kept me wondering is why some people claim they have services which they actually DO NOT have.

This might not be the only case but it is the only one I have come upon so far.

Systran? Well, this is something which you have to pay for and as we know, few people want to spend money for something they can get free.

As I said, competition is tough so the only thing I can do is sit and watch and wait to see who the winner will be.