Man against the Machine (Human vs. Machine Translation Tools)

Have you ever gotten an email from a friend who wrote to you in Spanish, or wanted to know what was on an Italian website and used Babble Fish to try and decipher the contents there in? A lot of people, at one point in time, have used some type of translating tool offered online, whether it is out of morbid curiosity of how to sing “Three Blind Mice” in German, or getting the general idea of an email sent from a business located in China. This phenomenon is called machine translation or MT for short, and it serves a certain purpose in the today’s fast paced world. And some would think that it would be sufficient enough that human translators will not be needed anymore. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really work that way.

Now, I’m not going to go on a rampage and bash all machine translators. They’re not bad tools; they’re just not useful if when precision and professionalism counts. So our best bet is to get both sides of the story. Hear where MT tools and human translators are coming from, if you will. Machine translators such as “Google Translator”, “Babble Fish” and “Language Weaver” generally operate the same way. They take words from a source language and replace them with the most suitable, orally spoken in the target language. It’s simple when looking in from the outside, but it’s a lot more complex than that. There’s semantics, syntax and grammar to think about. What’s more, there are idioms and cultural meanings that come into the mix. This can lead to some very faulty translations that can provide a good laugh or thoroughly confuse you. For example, there was a gaming store not too far away from my apartment complex in Osaka, Japan. I go inside to do some browsing and see a sign that read, plain as day, “We will sticky your favorite thing.” Now, aside from the usual inappropriate comments my friend and I made, we still, to this day, have no clue what they meant by that. Another little gem came about when I was walking past a beauty salon. The hulking sign in the shape of a palm tree, and the side of the building all read, “Parm Tree Resort”. If it was an attempt to spell palm tree, it didn’t go over too well. If it was an attempt to be cute and spell perm tree, kind of missed the mark there, too. So, as said before, machine translation software, at least the kind you can use for free, is not bad, but it’s not useful at all when one is using it for a business. Software such as dictionary-based, transfer-based and statistical machine translation help in making the translations look more natural as if a human translator was doing the translation. But the free stuff one can get online is best suited for simple sentences and words.

Alright, MT programs can’t translate the important stuff. Let us move on to human translators. Human translation, from a trained translator that speaks the source language natively and the target language fluently, is definitely a sure thing for translation projects of any kind. But keep in mind several considerations: If a massive document comes in with a sea of words several hundred pages long, expect a schedule that moves at a slower speed or having to split your project up between several translators. And hopefully you are working with a professional translation company, so to account for a human error; proof reading and editing must be done on top of translation. So how do you make your rush deadline and still keep your costs down?

This is all starting to sound too complicated to handle, yes. But wait, there’s more to this story. The two methods of translation certainly have their strengths and weakness, but when these two methods marry, they give birth to something that is virtually a perfect, speedy and accurate translator. We call this computer-aided translation or CAT tools. This system of translation uses both powerful and useful software from a wide variety of professional and fairly expensive programs to help with the large translations and trained human translators to tackle things the computer can’t. CAT tools aim at consistency, speed and lower costs. Programs, such as, for example, WordFast, have tools like Translation Memory to store and display segments of language already translated so slip ups like skipping text or retranslating what has already been translated can be avoided. There is also a tool called terminology management that will store terms that are repeated throughout the text in order to keep terminology in a document consistent. This, in turn, reduces the amount of time the translators have to spend working on a project and can lower the cost for their services. But the CAT tools, by no means, does any real translating. It is the human translators’ job to input glossaries, terminology, and do quality control. The computer is just there to keep their place and hold information that they, the translators put in. Human translators are the life of the whole process and CAT tools will only be as strong as the people who use them.

So, yes, we still do need human translators who are able to accurately convey a text’s meaning, but we cannot exclude software tools that help lighten the work load greatly. This leads to speedy work that saves money in the long run. But finding good translation services at an affordable price is kind of hard in Michigan, but never fear. Bromberg & Associates Translation Agency (B&A) is here to help you with any translation that you may need. Whatever the deadline, because we at B&A understand that quality assurance is the key to any successful business and we have been utilizing CAT tools to assist our skilled translators in doing fast, accurate and quality work.