WHAT do 产别苍锄辞别蝉盲耻谤别, 谩cido benzoico and 产别苍锄辞毛锄耻耻谤 have in common? They鈥檙e all benzoic acid, but in German, Italian and Dutch, as a new piece of software called Lexichem could tell you.
In a trial in which Lexichem was asked to translate 250,000 English chemical names into seven other languages and back again, it achieved a 98 per cent accuracy rate, in the Journal of Chemical Information and Modelling reveals ().
Roger Sayle of OpenEye Scientific Software in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which developed the program, says such a system is needed to prevent slip-ups in papers and patents. Human translators who overlook subtleties, such as spaces or capital letters, can end up with the name of an entirely different compound.
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