Modern human life poses new challenges in the communication space. The flow of information knows no boundaries in time and space, so the role of translation is unceasingly growing. It is important to understand where to start before making a final decision regarding the translation. The visual context is of great importance for high-quality interpretation, intonation, facial expressions, and gestures the speaker uses. Machine translation cannot take into account the context and uncertain situations. While a professional translator can analyze the context and use their experience. We can draw an important conclusion: the unique text translation is better to reproduce on a traditional basis.
Why Even Bother Considering Machine Translation?
Machine translation is not new. Machine translators have been in use for the past two or three decades. Moreover, users still find novelties like a technological version of the simultaneous interpreter in the form of real headphones paired with a mobile application from Waverly Labs. This project was supported by a staggering number of people on the crowdfunding platform Indiegogo, which actually guarantees a huge demand for this type of electronic translator.
5 Reasons Why Human Translators are Still More Efficient
The quality translation covers three key elements, content, context, and paragraph style. Medical and pharmaceutical documents, literary works with subtle nuances, reports, contracts should not be translated by machine. Why? The losses of companies from poor translation, though sometimes hidden, are quite real. The study showed that 40% of online shoppers leave the cart because of a poor description of the product. 42% returned the received goods due to the inconsistency of their description of reality. The man-made translation is more expensive and time-consuming, but its quality is superior. So let’s discuss all the reasons for human translation.
- Use of linguistic rules.
Quality translation requires knowledge of recognizing the features of the text: genre and style (for example, a journalistic article, poem, or standard document); area of knowledge to which the text belongs (recognition of terminology); coherence of parts of the text, which is not always described by syntactic or lexical-semantic criteria.
It can be assumed that for adequate translation it is necessary to know the internal structures of languages between which translation is carried out and to have a clear idea of culture, history, morality, the predominant types of thinking of native speakers. You also need to understand the semantic function: synonyms, antonyms, conversions, classical attributes, as well as be able to suggest derived parts of speech from a given word if any. As we understand it – it’s all very difficult for machine translation and clear enough for humans.
- The machine is not able to understand the culture.
This includes quite a lot, the characteristic slang, idioms, and their counterparts in another language. Only a native speaker can do that. And many words with several meanings exist too. In a certain culture, certain words mean one thing, but in another, they have a completely different meaning.
Only a person can determine which of them reproduces the true meaning by tying them to context. Machine translations contain so many inaccuracies, and sometimes they lose their meaning. Neither style nor tone can be conveyed by any translation machine. The same goes for a sense of humor.
- Vocabulary matters.
When translating texts by machine translation systems, words that are not in the automatic dictionary often occur. These are usually industry-specific terms or proper names. An untranslated word significantly affects the overall quality of the translation, as it falls out of the general analysis and can lead to the incorrect synthesis of the original sentence.
Therefore, the issue of improving such dictionaries, in our opinion, is quite important. The number of untranslated words can also indicate the quality of the system. Everyone who has had to learn a foreign language knows that the use of certain adjectives often does not coincide in the native and foreign languages. In addition, gross errors include cases of incorrect translation of only one word, the translation of which does not require any analysis and no translation transformations.
- People check everything.
In fact, artificial intelligence does not pose a threat to the translation profession. Machine translation is evaluated on two indicators, relevance and fluency. Correspondence is usually determined by the translator who is instructed to read the text and machine translation and to determine how well the latter conveys the content of the original. Freedom is tested by monolingual readers, who are asked to assess how well the translated text is expressed in their native language.
Without human intervention, translations will never be completed. If you look closely through this TheWordPoint review, you’ll find that many clients order tasks when they have a human translator check the work done by a machine. Professional translators read the text for grammatical and spelling errors, rework, and reformulate it, improving the style and localizing it according to the context and consumers in the target countries making it clear.
- Inaccuracy and errors.
Often complex and long sentences turn into an incomprehensible set of words and use a more commonly used word rather than what really fits the context. The technical literature suffers the most from this. The complexity of language is accessible only to man. Of course, the world is changing. Quality translation increases conversions and customer loyalty and improves search engine optimization for various marketplaces.
The most ingenious developers of automatic translation systems recognize that the complexity of language is available only to the human brain. Thus, artificial intelligence technologies come to the service of translators, rather than displacing the profession.
Humans Are Number One
Nowadays, there is a fairly wide selection of programs that facilitate the work of the translator, which is conditional can be divided into two main groups: electronic dictionaries (electronic dictionary) and machine systems translation (machine translation system). Analyzing machine translation programs, it should be noted at once that the requirements for them should not be the same, as well as the translation performed by a person.
A computer-generated translation is far from perfect, but the text obtained as a result of the work of the electronic translator allows in most cases to understand the essence of the document being translated. This document can then be adjusted with basic knowledge of the foreign language and well-versed in the subject area to which the translated information belongs
BIO:
With her endless enthusiasm and desire to constantly move forward, Merissa has a very promising career. She’s already wanted in many respected publications, though she prefers freelance. While Merissa’s future is always in her hands, she prefers rather experiencing it every day than holding it for later.
