Published in Machine translation, Translating - General Information on 25/01/2021
We used to laugh at them and sometimes, they even made us cry in despair: machine translation services. Over many years, machine translation services - first and foremost Google Translate - were perceived as THE Antichrist by professional translators. Originally, these services were only used for fun. - Today, however, so-called “neural machine translation services” have turned out to be the beginning of a new era in the history of machine translation. Here at Translation Agency Vienna | Connect Translations Austria GmbH, we are fully aware of that.
Machine Translations - The very beginning
In the early days of machine translation, translation services would simply replace a word from the source language with a word from the target language that would (more or less) correspond. They would often fail to properly translate syntactic differences, not to mention their inability to recognise jokes & other allusions. These early machine translation services were then replaced by other software programmes that were fed with information from large corpora. The software would compare the sentence that needed translating with information from the corpus it was linked to, and based on statistics, it would make a decision. These kinds of software programmes already achieved significantly better results, but they were still not able to distinguish literal from figurative meaning.
Machine Translation & Neural Machine Translation Services
This is not the case with neural machine translation services: They are capable of learning like a human brain. They do this by creating so-called “semantic clusters” and identifying sequences of words that are used together more frequently than others. This is also the reason why they are better at dealing with jokes & allusions. Neural machine translation services produce very natural sounding results and make surprisingly few mistakes. Especially if many texts on a similar topic are fed into a software programme for neural machine translation, the results are extraordinary.
Machine Translation - The end of translators as we know them?
Does this mean that the days of translators as we know them are numbered? No, on the contrary. Machine translation programmes can, if used moderately and in a sensible way, be quite useful tools that speed up and facilitate the work of translators. But even the best machines cannot compete with human imagination. Not even neural machine translation services: They simply can’t keep up with the creativity of human beings, especially, when it comes to translating creative texts, where the skilful and eloquent use of language is essential. Leaving this aspect aside, it might also be interesting to very briefly mention an emerging field of activity that is new to translators and translation agencies and that has been developing from the increasing use of machine translation: Post-editing, where professionally trained translators edit a pre-translated text.
Machine Translation: an opportunity
There are two possible ways to react to innovation: You can either cut yourself off, condemn everything new and never stop lamenting it. Or you can try to make use of these new technologies in the best possible way in order to find practicable solutions for the benefit of everyone. We here at Translation Agency Vienna | Connect Translations Austria GmbH firmly believe that there will always be a need for translators - we are optimistic about the future. It’s therefore no coincidence that our motto here at Translation Agency Vienna | Connect Translations Austria GmbH is: Translating the Future.
