Humans and machines don’t always get along: the former are often envious of the latter’s ability to perform tasks with greater efficiency, consistency, and more precise results. The antagonistic sentiments which many people have harbored for machines stretch back many years, and in particular any time machines or technology in general have displaced human workers, the uproar has generally been quite vociferous–anybody recall the Luddites?!
In the translation community, many people were beginning to get the jitters due to the recent release of Google’s various automated translation tools: first the Translators toolkit and more recently the automatic translation of entire websites with the click of a button. Rumors spread and fears were aroused; however, with a little investigation, many translators have discovered that there is not so much cause for concern, at least not yet. It looks like for now, human translators simply cannot be replaced!
That’s because the quality of machine translations is simply dismal–there’s no prettier way of putting it. Businesses need to ask themselves the following question then: is it preferable to pay a modest fee to have a trained professional translate a text (a sales pitch, a website, a brochure, etc.), or is it best to rely on the “experimental” automatic translation services being offered by companies such as Google? Here at Trusted Translations, we share the widely held belief that if you’re not going to bother having something translated well, then don’t bother having it translated at all–in the end, its worse to advertise yourself in a foreign language market with sloppy language than to simply abstain from that market altogether (at least till you’re ready to affront the issue in a serious manner).
Want proof? Then do what I did: take a look at some of the automatic translations of websites and compare the target and source texts…you’ll be amazed! There is simply no business sense in “playing it easy” in this regard.
Tags: automatic translations, business sense, google, Luddites, machine translations, technology, translation community, websites
@Bryant H: That’s because the quality of machine translations is simply dismal
The quality of machine translation is dependent partly on the quality of the source text.
In an evaluation, English text was translated into Spanish using Google Translate. Professional translators evaluated the machine translations. The machine translations have a satisfactory quality (http://www.international-english.co.uk/mt-evaluation-en-es.html).
As a translator, I strongly stick to the fact that a machine will never be able to translate documents the same way a human does it.
Why are human translators better than machines? The answer is part of my question: because we are humans! We have the ability to have emotions, to feel, to distinguish, to make the difference very precisely because that’s basically the way humans are! Machines don’t have such a capacity.
Let’s take a common and simple example : literary translation. It is obvious that a machine will never be able to have the emotion and feelings that are absolutely necessary to read between the lines or feel a sensation and sentiments, only the human complexity can do this.
Just to have fun I once tried the Google translation system and actually had a good laugh as the result was kind of funny. The machine can translate small, not very complicated documents in a pretty fair way, and I consider myself quite nice when I use the adjective “fair”… The machine does not understand expressions, proverbs or maxims for example, it just works word by word. It is slightly capable to analyze the context of a text but it doesn’t recognize the subtlties of a language.
A machine is a machine. Translation machines may be able to help, but they will NEVER be able to replace a human being.
Hi Mike,
thanks for your comment; there’s always room for disagreement here!
I think I should clarify my stance a bit:
I find the intentions and some of the possible results of these machine translations to be commendable. If we can raise intercultural awareness and communication with automatic Google translations, excellent. However, I think that for the purposes of business in the process of expansion, these automatic translations can be a recipe for disaster. Breaking into a new market via such means seems to me like a sloppy way to go about the process, and I find it difficult to believe that these automatic translations can really convey the business’s message in the first place.
I was unable to view the site you linked to–I get a “page not found” message. However, I am curious what criteria were used by the team of professional translators you mention regarding the evaluation of these Google translations. Personally, I selected a handful of random sites (mostly of businesses with something to sell) and ran the automatic translation; I found that the important messages were either lost altogether or were simply impossible to understand in the translation. There were way too many “borrowed words” (and not of the kind that tend to be borrowed among educated speakers of Spanish, in this case) and mistranslations, and the crucial messages relating to the products to be sold were almost entirely lost.
In sum, personally I find it hard to assess these translations as “satisfactory” though, for certain purposes, I don’t think they’re harmful; in other contexts, they most certainly would be harmful!
Indeed!
Thank god for our human subtleties and use of proverbs, expressions, etc. As I mentioned in my reply to the other comment left above, I think that these automatic translations are acceptable in given circumstances, but when you enter the world of business–where effective communication is an absolute necessity for sales, growth, etc.–I just don’t think there’s any room for them. In fact, wherever accuracy and precision are in need, Google translations should be strictly forbidden.
People will have to judge for themselves on this topic. As with everything, there’s more than one side to this debate. Thanks for your input!