A suggestion as to how a professional translator might help his clients with machine translation

| 16-09-2009 | Translation | Written by Matthew Bennett

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Last Friday, I posted a question for you: how could a professional translator help his clients more with machine translation? Here is one suggestion, which is very much open to debate and comment.

Professional human translators look at the output of machine translation efforts and try not to sigh too loudly. There have been great advances in machine translation but it still takes an experienced professional translator longer to correct the output of machine translation than it does for him to start from scratch.

Problems with machine translation

From the client’s point of view, it appears as though we should pay more attention. After all, Google and all of these great companies have invented new translation tools and it appears you can now go on to the Internet and just copy and paste your text into a little box and voilà, more or less you get the idea.

Is it good enough? You’re not quite sure if you’re getting all of the understanding you need, are you? A professional translator could give you 100% certainty but you would have to pay him, and that is going to depend on how important the document is to you.

How could a professional translator help you in another way? A good one, after all, wants to look after his clients.

What if he used machine translation and then just corrected for meaning, not grammar? Let’s look at an example. Here’s an original phrase:

“What could professional translators do to help their clients about the gaps in meaning which are evident once you know what you’re looking at? Where could we draw a new line between translation quality and the everyday, harsh reality of our clients’ companies?”

And here’s its machine-translated equivalent:

“What could professional translators to assist their clients on the gaps that are obvious once you know what you’re looking at? Where do we draw a new line between the quality of translation and daily life, the harsh reality of companies are our customers?“

Clearly the second phrase is not quite right – there are all sorts of little errors (grammatical, syntactical and others) but you get the idea although there seems to be more confusion at the end (highlighted in red).

Imagine your professional translator looked at that output and, instead of correcting it all, just sent you something like this:

“What could professional translators to assist their clients on the gaps that are obvious once you know what you’re looking at? Where do we draw a new line between the quality of translation and the daily, harsh reality of our customers’ companies?”

It’s not perfect, it’s not Shakespeare, it’s not what you would get if the translator started from scratch and it’s not good enough for your important public and private documents, but if you just want to be sure of understanding what you’re reading, it’s a better option than the machine translation attempt.

We must imagine this idea for a full length article or document, of course.

Professional translators

• Would your clients like this sort of service?
• Would you be prepared to hand over something which is not 100%?
• Would it be possible to correct just for meaning in longer texts?
• Would you be prepared to offer a lower rate for this type of service – low enough to interest your clients – in exchange for running it all through a machine translation service and just correcting for meaning?

Clients:

• Is this type of service – basically having extra confidence in your understanding of texts in another language – something you would like to be able to ask for?
• Would you be prepared to pay for it?