Machine translation - Extra Speech

When I say I am a Professional Translator…

Oh, you’re a professional translator?
You translate books?
Can you translate this song for me?
A friend: Can you translate this email for me? (You answer yes, and get pretty much an entire report from a chemical company to translate…)

A Very Vague Idea of Translation

After I graduated, I became accustomed to always explaining what my profession really is, but I would not judge. When I was in University, I also had a very different and vague idea of what the real world of the translation was and everything it involved. In my imagination, I thought I would graduate and translate books (novels, of course!).

The Hidden Translator

Also, when facing questions from people curious about the profession, in their defence, I also think that the professional translator is always a little hidden, and many people forget that behind the movies, books, manuals, magazines, articles, there is always someone who is shaking their head so that they always receive exactly the message that the author wants to communicate.

Translating to Learn New Things Every Day

The reality, and what I think is fantastic, is that quite contrary to what I used to think, the translation profession allows us to learn new things every day, from the most varied subjects. And that boy who hated technology, today loves the more technical subjects and those manuals that before seemed impossible to be understood.

The Professional Translator Has a Responsibility

The translator has the responsibility to translate not only words, but ideas and thoughts in the most faithful way possible, and for that, dictionaries are not enough. It takes a lot of culture, a lot of sensitivity and a lot of knowledge. He must respect the structure of the source text, always keep in mind the target audience and have patience to search for specific terms and grammatical structures, thus maintaining the fluency of the text.

Any mistake, however small, can completely change the meaning of the original text, so it is very important that the professional translator remains extremely focused during his work.

Keeping the text alive

In addition, the language is alive, so we must always be following its changes. And when I think about machine translation! No, they are not the dream of any translator. In fact, they can even be a nightmare! A text translated by an automatic tool requires much more time for revision, since the choice of words, the grammatical structure and the ideas did not start from a brain, but from a program. A machine does not follow the language evolution and cannot interpret the author’s emotions and intentions. We have to think a lot, so that the same message is passed, regardless of the language in which it is written.

Translation – Not Something to Improvise

Many people, when they come back from a season abroad, begin translating to earn a little ‘buck’. I have just mentioned a few examples that prove how complex our profession is and how it is not enough to know, for example, English and French very well. This applies to any area, really. A person might think that they can run a restaurant because they like cooking. But like any profession, translation requires professionals. Any other way and the text, and the ideas that need to become communicated die with a bad translation. And, we do not want that to happen, right?

Once again, a discussion took place on technological issues – in particular, the joint use of Machine Translation and Computer-Assisted Translation or Computer-Aided Translation as translation tools used by professional translators.

Machine translation – A bit of context

The attempt to manufacture automatic translation systems (MT – Machine Translation, or AT) emerged after the Second World War. By the 1970s, it was already quite clear that no computer was able to replicate all human reasoning behind decoding, translating, and recoding texts except those texts with extremely limited structure and vocabulary.

Computer-Assisted Translation Tools Have Flourished

In the last two decades, CAT (Computer-Assisted Translation – Tools) have flourished. They are optimised databases, originally integrated with text editors such as MS Word, then stand alone translation software. Those save everything a person translates – original source text and translation – and offers tools to manage glossaries. The idea is to accelerate translation work with research and typing, reusing terms and previously translated passages.

Most Machine Translation software is free – Wanna Know Why?

As of MT programs, we all know about those, mainly the free ones (Babelfish/Altavista, Systran, and, of course, Google Translate, among others). What has always been very obvious is that they are weak, making grammatical errors and gross terminology, serving only to have a vague idea of what a site addresses, for example. Yet, no self-respecting professional would even look at such a program.

MT and CAT – A marriage of convenience

But technology has been evolving, and anyone who has been ignoring these applications for some years may have been surprised to find Google Translate to be unintended and that it is a lot smarter than we thought.

Then, one day, at a ATA Congress, a couple of translators presented a research combining MT and CAT: translation memory to store and reuse excerpts and expressions, and Google Translate for segments still to be translated, all monitored and reviewed by the translator. The results were amazing as far as speed and quality were concerned. A Presentation slide was made available, which I didn’t see at that time but I would follow some of the authors’ e-mail exchanges on the ATA mailing list. Again at the time, it was the kind of application for which I had the highest expectation.

Everybody’s Talking About It

Interestingly, almost 11 years ago, I wrote a monograph on machine translation. Part of my essay told the story and evolution of systems, and another part presented a test with software that existed at the time. This second part is totally obsolete – the system no longer exists and, frankly, the research was very weak, just a test without much scientific basis. I only left the text available on the internet until today because it is still quite cited because of the historical summary. What I find curious is that the discussion about MT is coming back in terms not very different from the ones I used in this article, after the CATs had gained their well-deserved space in history – much of which occurred well after this work.

Machine Translation Born of an Impossible Ideal

In short: MT and computer-assisted translation were born of an impossible ideal. It was relegated to a by-product that does not affect the lives of translators. Suddenly, it comes around as something that yes, can be very useful, but raises a lot of questions, professional and ethical.

If, on the one hand, there are serious research and experiments, there is also the world of ordinary people. The translation market continues to grow. There is an increasing demand and more and more people wanting to be a translator. People wanting to learn and improve themselves, and also people wanting “easy” money (note the quotes).

Everybody’s – Still – Talking About It

Because of all this, discussions about market trends are boiling over on the “new” application of free MT software. Will many unprepared people use these applications without discretion? Do they even pose a threat to the “big” translators or do they even need to worry?

You will find many discussions on this topic in the Localisation professional group on Facebook.

In my opinion, those days, we can no longer bury our heads in the sand and fail to take notice and participate in this discussion. If several tools have already led us to increase productivity, quality and consistency of translations, the pressure for high productivity will only increase with the new generation of tools. The differential translators who believe they deserve to earn well for their work will have to account for this productivity, in addition to a quality far above the market average, since productivity without much quality is easy to achieve.