MT And Human Translation Analysis

The advent of MT brought about a whole new set of concerns and questions regarding the impact of MT on the translation industry. This Article sets out to study such effects, as well as; answer the most recurrent questions related to the subject. With the increasing translation technologies out there, there emerged a need to discuss the nature of MT, how it works, what distinguishes it from human translation, as well as; address the positive and negative uses of MT and related future concerns.

Introduction

A brief definition of Machine Translation (also referred to as automated, automatic and instant translation) would describe it as the application of computers to the translation of texts from one (Target Language) language into another

Generally speaking , MT websites such as Google Translate are fast and do not cost a single penny , whereas human translations can cost clients hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Google translate also provides links for real person translations if needed. On the other hand, Google Translate may not produce the best translation, and may generate a translation that is unnatural or simply wrong, also Google’s disclosure of information is important to consider as Google keeps translation memory in its database, and publishes it to other translators, thereby violating user’s privacy and confidentiality in the process.

3. As is often the case; with speed comes compromise. Machine translation can introduce inaccurate meanings, awkward sentence structures and, at times, fatal funny mistakes as in mission-critical healthcare and consumer safety scenarios — when a mistranslated sentence could mean life or death.

4. If a translator runs his/her job through a MT engine and then reverses the translation by sending it through another directional language pair in machine translation engine in order to translate it again back into the source language, there could be an error rate which will make translations sound too "literal" and therefore more awkward than a human translation, and sometimes even quite incomprehensible.

Common Myths about

Machine Translation has been helpful to use for some translation agencies that use a combination of human skills and machine based translation, alternately, some agencies use a first round of Machine translation followed by a cleaning and refining by manual means, in all cases the need of human translators remains indispensable in the translation industry.

Conclusively, as newer Machine Translation tools are being created, they can be used in a complimentary manner to add value to the efforts of human translators. Machine translations may be successfully used as assistive tools and can be recommended to get the overall picture or meaning of a short note or few words, but it is safe to say that Machines will never replace the need for skilled human translators as many professionals fear, nor will they kill the translation industry, not any time soon in the future