A few months ago, my professional colleagues commented with some trepidation and a trembling voice on the changes in the industry that were taking place through translation technology. For that matter, I am surprised that it is only the wider use of machine translation that has caused a wave of fear in our industry.
It's a bit like wiping out decades of development of translation support tools. The tools that have revolutionised translation on the same scale that emails have transformed the way humans communicate.
In our world, the only constant is that everything is constantly changing, and it is our job to adapt as best we can to these ever-changing conditions. If you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backwards.
Post-editing has settled into the translation industry,
and this fact is no longer a secret to anyone. A couple of weeks ago, I was talking to a client about the express translation service for extensive documentation with a high degree of difficulty. During this conversation, one of the client's employees made it clear that the aforementioned use of machine translation on a global scale had made life very complicated for him and his team.
Improperly performed post-editing, a process when a human is supposed to check and, if necessary, correct the machine translation, results in the reproduction of errors in the content published on websites - including industry-specific ones. The end result is that even traditional human translations reproduce certain dubious phrases, expressions or terms.
The reason for this is the pervasive presence of machine content, which is signed by humans. Translators read this content when researching and familiarising themselves with a particular topic. They are confronted with them on the websites of various companies until, at some point, they consider that what they have read is correct, natural and the professional terminology used there is accepted.
This is particularly true for very specialised content - for example, new technological developments or innovative products that are just entering a particular market.
What is the problem with post-editing and machine translation?
Undoubtedly, machine translation plays an important role in translation processes today and, when combined with advanced and scalable CAT platforms, allows for a reduction in translation development efforts.
Machine translation is used not only by translation agencies and freelance translators, but also by public administrations and companies. The latter often do this on their own without involving professional interpreters. This means that automatically generated translations do not go through the stage of necessary verification and proofreading - as part of the so-called post-editing.
One of the ways in which machine translation differs from human translation is that it is not the result of a thought process. Regardless of the type of algorithms used and the complexity of the processes involved, machine translations are created from existing bilingual parallel corpora.
The machine (algorithm / neural network) does not try to understand the content being transmitted. It does not consider how, or whether at all, the proposed version of the translation will be understood by the potential recipient of that translation. It does not take a coffee break, after which it looks again at the problematic passages in order to try, with a refreshed mind, to come up with a different way of presenting the reality described.
It is thus advisable that any machine translation goes through a verification stage carried out by a qualified translator. Skipping this essential step and publishing unverified content online compounds the problem described above. People are increasingly exposed to machine content and the vicious circle is established.
Consequently, this can lead to various problems, troubles or misunderstandings. Let me quote a public opinion on a faulty translation, which quite clearly shows that in this particular case no man has checked the machine:
I share the views of other dissatisfied customers. Admittedly, I used the services of this company a few years ago, but as I received a spam text message from them today, they reminded me of the distaste that remained after our cooperation. The translations from Polish to English made at my request sounded in many places like the work of Google Translate corrected by a not very diligent high school student. I understand that some of the vocabulary words in my text were technical, but nothing explains what a person was thinking who, in a text in which the word "power" is repeatedly used, translates a Polish phrase "cenne waty" (eng. Valuable energy) into "precious cotton". Not recommended!
I just found similar errors on the website of a company that offers access to a platform that provides instant machine translation into more than 85 languages. In addition to integration with all popular content management systems (content management system, CMS), the service provider assures us of the excellent quality of the translation, while in the main menu on its website we see an item called DOM (eng. HOUSE instead of HOME [PAGE]).
As a client, you always have the choice between Home page and House or Valuable energy and Precious cotton. Just remember not to overpay for some cotton.
