Who is not using MT today?

Christine Andersen wrote:

I am not in principle opposed to MT any more. It is not going to go away, and it has its uses.

However, I have reached the point where this dog is too old to learn all the necessary tricks, and I strongly dislike PEMT. (I don't revise/edit/proofread much at all these days, apart from my own work.)

I think it may make a considerable difference which language pair MT is used on, and a great many other factors. I translate from Danish to English, and Denmark is an affluent, highly digitised country with plenty of resources and research being carried out into developing AI, MT and robots in general.
There are huge volumes of material to train the engines on, and I have heard a colleague call the results 'frighteningly good'. Nevertheless, we still circulate howlers when we find them, and there are some basic problems that have not yet been solved.
Gender is one with Danish to English. Danish has gender-neutral pronouns and expressions, which call for occasionally tricky decisions when they are translated into English. For a human most become routine, but MT often gets them wrong.
Another is multi-element verbs. They do not work in the same way as German separable verbs, but when the elements are separated, MT may have difficulty in associating them (and so do inexperienced humans).
One example I heard went through variations of the verb slå - basically to beat, as in thrash, heartbeat and a range of other meanings.
slå [something] op = look something up, as in a dictionary or phone book
slå op med [e.g. a person] = break up a relationship
slå ud, slå an, slå til all mean completely different things, often depending on context.

Syntax… even in closely related languages like English and Danish.
And so on.

Admittedly some time ago now, I promised several of my clients that I will not use MT. It was originally for security reasons. They did hot want private and sensitive documents to end up in databases beyond their control in TM Town, Google Translate or anywhere else, even if they were supposedly fragmented beyond recognition.
Besides, I honestly find it easier and quicker to produce good results without MT.

I hope the market will settle into sections where MT is useful, and sections where only humans can really do the job. There will probably also be sections where humans interact with MT, preferably happily in time.

Personally, I aim for the human-only market, although I happily use Trados Studio with a lot of the offline bells and whistles, aka features, AutoSuggest and so on. That is as close as I go to MT!
All the input is mine or from trusted agencies and colleagues, and I really try to keep my TMs and databases up to date. I NEVER work online, except to link up with one specific client's server to use their TMs.

That is my viewpoint, and of course, I respect that others will work differently.

Fatih ÇITAK wrote:

Hello there. I think MTs are not to be relied upon, inasmuch as the fact that they most usually need and will need a post-editing still by a human hand. I do not see MT as the future-thief of our profession, because translation is not just about conveying the gist but the textuality, context, connotation, wordplays etc.

If we regard the translation as a diagram, we can name the margins as "Traditional Human Translation" with zero technology and "Fully Automated Computer Translation" with zero humans. We should not be a the margins but in the middle. I think using CAT tools is a perfect example of being in the middle. We benefit by computer technologies (i.e translation memories, termbases etc. in a dijital platform that may be harder to produce in a non-digital platform), but we should not fully rely upon MT or miscellaneous technologies and think that they will eventually take our jobs from us.

As most futuristic people think that MT will do that; I, on the other hand, think the various technologies will cause a natural selection in our industry. Then, not every person will be able to claim they are "able to translate" just because they "know the language", which will lead to an increase in quality of both translation products and processes. Translation will require much more complicated knowledge(both theoretically and technologically), which will culminate in more professional translators taking place in the industry.

Before I finish my comment, I would like give an example. Did the sector of agriculture end when the machinery was introduced in it? No, it did not. Instead, this development oriented amateur agriculturers into new job fields, opened new business areas and only people that could cope with machinery knowledge became prominent in agriculture. I do think that this will be the case in our industry as well, not exactly the same of course but similar.

Thank you for reading


Fatih Serdar Citak - An enthusiastic and eager translator.

Kay Denney wrote:

Some of us don't even use CAT tools!

If you're doing technical translation, of course it makes sense to use a CAT tool and why not hook up MT with it, especially if you find it useful.

In my lines of business (art music fashion textiles cosmetics marketing...) I do need to be consistent with terminology but it's mostly well dinned into my head by now. Apart from the technical terminology, the most important talent is a beautiful writing style, which includes using original turns of phrase, puns, poetic devices such as alliteration and metaphor, the ability to rewrite the same text in a way that will appeal more deeply to my readers.
MT won't help with any of that, just like CATs.

The Misha wrote:

... assuming that everyone else is in the same boat. But we are not. Quite a few of us do not translate technical specifications or vacuum cleaner user guides. Indeed, like Kay mentioned above, there are plenty of jobs out there that require good writing skills and a certain finesse. It's a different kind of translation and a different market altogether.

Ever wondered why jewelers do not ordinarily use jackhammers?