Depending on your desired goals and intentions with a project and (and what?), you have two options when it comes to translating your content: machine translation (MT) and human translation. When it comes to automation, amazing developments have been witnessed in the translation industry. Machine translation is being widely used by a lot of people and have proved to be useful. Some translators are scared that they will one day be replaced with machines. Presently, this is not possible yet, because the technology still lacks on quality and a lot of post editing is required, for it to be perfect.
Which one is better?
- Machine translators:
Machine translation is practically instantaneous and continues to improve by leaps and bounds each day thanks to the use of ai. A machine can handle huge volumes of documents, much more than a person, or even a team of people could. Sometimes this is just what is needed. For example, if a company takes over a company, they may need all of that companies documents translated into a different language or vice versa. Depending on the size of the business, that could be thousands and thousands of pages. Employee records, financial records, tax documents, etc. all needing to be translated.
Advantages
It’s free, it’s instant & online, it contains multiple languages
Disadvantages
It’s limited, it won’t give natural, fluent translation, Not every language is offered, Context is not part of the equation
How professional translation works?
Translators (Human Translation) take into account context, nature of content, target audiences, literacy levels and more, Cat- tools are a human translation carried out with the aid of computerized tools. That is, a human translator is the one reading and deducing the meaning of the source text and transferring it into the target language. They are simply utilizing computerized translation tools to help them work more quickly and accurately.
Speaking of dictionaries, when a translator does need to look up a word, they can save time by using a computerized dictionary. There are simply things that machine translators cannot understand and translate accurately. This includes humor, sarcasm, many inclusionary terms, idiomatic speech, pidgin languages or dialects, etc. They also cannot understand the meaning behind inside jokes or anecdotes. Most don’t understand industry-specific jargon either. In addition to this, machine translators cannot determine meaning of written or spoken word based upon context. It takes a human translator or localization specialist to do these things.
Want our opinion on which method of translation would best serve your needs?
The answer depends on what’s best for your translation project.
- Machine translation cannot currently replace human translation completely as such translation will be prone to errors. For now, machines can never translate any documents the way a human would. That doesn’t mean that the machine vs human translation battle is over, as the most accurate translations still come from professionally trained humans.
it’s only the beginning, we’ll have to live and see it evolve.
