Free Online Translation Vs Professional Human Translations
With so many free translation sites available in the Internet
, the future of the translation industry as we know seems challenging. Currently, with just one click, you can translate documents and websites.In spite of the numerous critics that automated translations receive, they certainly, have some advantages that which is why they have become so popular after all, it is a free service that can be used 24/7 and provides a quick translation. The main disadvantage still remains as the lack of accuracy.
In the last couple of years, machine translations have made significant improvements in quality with Google Translate leading the computer machine revolution. This system has been through21 different stages of development. The most recent phase took place in October 2010 and it allows phonetic typing for Arabic, Greek, Hindi, Persian, Russian, Serbian and Urdu.
The process used by Google is "statistical machine translation" which means that the computers are fed with billions of words of text and examples of human translations between diverse languages. In this way, the computer builds patterns based on the analysis of the input data. Google Translate offers the users the chance to improve translations and, therefore, the system.
One disadvantage of this system is that for those languages with fewer documents available, there will be fewer patterns and therefore the quality of the translation will be poorer than the ones which involve more popular languages.
Google Translate has many followers and also many detractors. Lee Gomes, thetechnology columnist of Forbes, recently compared its fluency to that of "a barely competent human translator, one who happens to be both distracted and drunk".
One of the main limitations of computer translation is their inability to place translations in a context and to distinguish between the different varieties that a language might have.
But Google seems determined to keep improving its translation system. Currently, it is developing software for the first phone capable of translating foreign languages almost instantly like the Babel Fish in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy!
If Google or any other company comes up with more accurate translation software, what impact will this have in the translation industry? Will this mean the end of professional translation as we know?
Even if Google improve their system creating specific software for particular areas (e.g. Google translate Technical, Google translate Law, etc.) or create a system that could distinguish the context where the text is placed, there is several fields that will require human translation.
Think, for instance, in literary translation or marketing translation. These fields require creativity to convey the intended meaning accurately. Many competent professional translators have struggled to deliver culturally suitable advertising translations. Will a machine do better?
When translating books or movies, translators need in-depth understanding of the target language and intended audience. The translation of film titles and brand names involves many complex factors. In many cases, marketing experts do an exhaustive research to find the most suitable and engaging name. Film titles depend on the content of films, the psychology of the audience and other cultural factors. Could a computer cope with this task? It seems improbable. A computer is unable to write a poem or appreciate art and, therefore saying that human professional translation services will be replaced by computer translations is equivalent to saying that computers will start writing poetry.
Even with a challenging future ahead, human translation services cannot be replaced by machine translations. They cannot compete with machine translations in cost, access and turnaround, but they can provide something that is indispensable to overcome the language barriers: cultural and linguistic accuracy.
In an increasingly globalized society, the role of culturally accurate translations seems indispensable to avoid cross-cultural misunderstandings and to increase commercial and cultural exchange. As Umberto Ecco stated "translations do not concern a comparison between two languages but the interpretation of two texts in two different languages".
Professional translations play a crucial role in the global marketplace of commodities. The specialised knowledge of professional translators gives an added value to the translation process and its outcome and this should be emphasized by translation companies when selling their services. A translation should comply with linguistic and aesthetical standards and also with the contextual standards given by the subject matter. An advertising translation, for instance, must make commercial sense in the target market and to achieve that, the translator must be able to understand market trends and consumer psychology. He should also be aware of the marketing strategy used by the company in that specific locale.
Machine translation can improve their linguistic accuracy but the cultural and linguistic understanding of what the client needs remains exclusive to human professional translators.
Free Online Translation Vs Professional Human Translations
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