Translating words and passages on a search engine can throw up some interesting results. I can remember submitting my French homework into a search engine and copying word for word the translation it gave. The teacher, of course, saw right through this as the result was often garbled. The translation of poetry online can be seen as even a greater challenge. Poems are so deliberate in their form and language that it is hard to see how an online translation can maintain the poem's integrity.
According to the Guardian, Google, 'the internet's favourite one-stop shop is now working on the machine-translation of not just words, but meter and rhyme.' How the poetic nuances of words can be captured in translation is difficult to see. Surely a machine will not be able to distinguish between 'flaw' with the meaning 'blemish' and 'flaw' with the meaning 'broken'. Minute distinctions within themselves, but essential to the meaning of a poem.
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