If you believe the hype coming out of certain tech companies’ PR departments, you’ll hear all sorts about how recent advances in “neural” mean that machine translation is “nearly indistinguishable” from professional quality.
But of course, you’ve actually used those services and know that’s absolute nonsense.
Because machine translation engines are trained on simplistic and isolated sentences from Wikipedia and newswires, they rarely capture the nuance and idiosyncrasies of human language — a robot can’t be funny.
So while Google Translate and its ilk might be able to translate a headline or a short phrase, it’s woefully underpowered when it comes to understanding subtlety and tone of voice — which is precisely what you need if you’re in the market for translation outsourcing or plugging in a translation API.
Professional-quality Translation as a Service
Here at Unbabel we believe that there’ll always be a part for humans to play in the process of translation. We believe that the future isn’t machine translation, it’s machine + human translation.
Machines allow us to speed up the translation process, but they need that human touch to make the outputs usable by modern enterprises.
As Professor Andy Way, one of the fathers of machine translation said: “the human in the loop will always be the most important part of that translation pipeline.”
Unbabel avoids the timely, costly process of hiring freelance translators, opting instead to employ state-of-the-art Neural Machine Translation to deliver faster translations that keep improving.
Following that, we put the world’s best Quality Estimation System to work. It identifies the words that are incorrect and provides automatic quality scores for each translated sentence.
Then it’s over to our global community of tens of thousands of linguists who pay special attention to the parts that we’ve been able to highlight as needing attention, delivering the translation quality that Machine APIs can’t.
Perhaps that’s why the Financial Times says we’re changing the world.
Perhaps that’s why we should talk about your business’s needs today.
Here, pop us a message and we’ll get back to you in the next day or so. 🙂
Source: https://unbabel.com/blog/better-machine-translation-quality-human-translation-api/