Thank you. I think context is extremely important and very difficult to get right. I remember reading one article by Google engineer where they discuss how they keep improving their analysis of search queries.
E.g.
[Search Term] -> [Interpretation]
New York -> New York city
New York Times -> The news paper
New York Times Square -> Famous tourist spot in NYC.
There were other examples in the article. I will try to find that article and link it up.
I think Google should buy these guys and provide them with their knowledge of 'context'. Google Translate team and these guys should talk right away.
I used to work in machine translation, about 15 years ago. At the time, one of the big things they were working on was an improvement to the contextual inferences. The prior versions were able to consider context within a single sentence, and input documents could be tagged with a subject area, so the system would know to resolve ambiguities in favor of, say, medical terms.
The best examples of this, I thought, were the following passages:
Yesterday I went to the symphony. The sound was beautiful.
versus
Yesterday I went to Long Island. The sound was beautiful.
In the first passage, sound refers to an auditory experience; in the second, it refers to a body of water. Within the sentence "The sound was beautiful", there's no way to know which to use, so one must look to surrounding information to make a guess.
But I've given a short and clear example; anyone can see the right solution. But in real-life usage it's frequently unclear.
On the other hand, "muerto fin" has NO meaning in spanish, (and that's what you get when you translate word for word without context).