Posts Tagged ‘machine translations’

Most translators have heard of the new online machine translation option called “Google Translate”. While many would argue that machine translations have several issues regarding accuracy and the inability to understand the text like humans do, this has become a widely popular tool, so much so that YouTube recently announced the launch of a Translate option for captioned videos.

This feature provides real-time translations of video captions with a variety of language options, all powered by Google Translate. While YouTube readily admits that machine translations have flaws, they hope to make their videos more accessible to a broader audience.
Here are the instructions from YouTube’s blog: “To get a translation for your preferred language, move the mouse over the bottom-right arrow, and then over the small triangle next to the CC (or subtitle) icon, to see the captions menu. Click on the “Translate…” button and then you will be given a choice of many different languages.”

Take a look at how this works with the link below.

YouTube Translation

So what do you think? Will the widespread use of machine translations, particularly Google Translate, cause a stir amongst more traditional translators? Or is this just another way to help tackle the language barriers?

With all the new developments and increasing accessibility of electronic translation tools such as machine translations, some have argued that these technologies will eventually replace the human translator. Are human translators really essential for the translation process, or can their labor be simplified and processed by a machine?

Researchers have been working for decades in order to establish computer systems capable of translating from one natural language to another. These systems do so by essentially deconstructing the components of the text such as the punctuation marks, recognized idioms, single word terminology, and sentence structure and then reconstructing these elements in the target language by applying specific linguistic rules and “learning” from already existing translations.

This all sounds promising, but we are forgetting that languages are filled with ambiguities and complex rules that not even a computer can successfully resolve. As all translators know, the process of translation involves much more than simply replacing the source word with the target language word. This process involves using cultural, grammatical, syntactic and semantic knowledge in order to interpret the real meaning and ensure that it makes sense to native readers.

Machine translations offer an attractive package for users, ensuring instant turnaround times and a systematic and consistent approach when handling translations. However, we must consider that while the process of human translations is much slower in this sense, only humans can determine the suitability of a translation for a particular audience and make linguistic and style choices based on experience instead of a database.