| Pages in topic: < [1 2] | No need for human translation? Thread poster: Michele Fauble
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Baran Keki 
Türkiye
Local time: 15:13
Member
English to Turkish
| Forget about MT | Feb 6, 2023 |
Learning English is a lot easier than it was 25-30 years ago thanks to the internet, Netflix, Youtube etc.
All you need to do this job is to get a computer, an internet connection, some tips from Proz forums (which the do-gooders will supply in abundance) and then you're set. You can start earning EUR, USD (the proverbial peanuts) with absolutely zero translation experience, but that doesn't matter, because you're sure that the crap American TV series you've watched without subtitles will... See more Learning English is a lot easier than it was 25-30 years ago thanks to the internet, Netflix, Youtube etc.
All you need to do this job is to get a computer, an internet connection, some tips from Proz forums (which the do-gooders will supply in abundance) and then you're set. You can start earning EUR, USD (the proverbial peanuts) with absolutely zero translation experience, but that doesn't matter, because you're sure that the crap American TV series you've watched without subtitles will stand you in good stead.
Everybody here (where I live) thinks they can translate, because they think they know/speak good English (they don't even seem to count this as a profession). It's so easy to get into the agencies' books by clicking on the 'Join Us' button or sending in a fake CV. And the result is crap translations worse than MT output, and agency TMs polluted by that garbage, based on which your rates are calculated and reduced, and which you end up taking ownership of.
Machine Translation is not the cause of the problem, it's the crap, clueless human translators getting into the profession with absolutely zero experience, knowledge, skills, mastery of their source and target languages. They're the ones driving the rates down, not the MT as far as I can tell.
Some form of regulation is needed, and 300 word agency test translations (where the assessment quality/impartiality cannot be guaranteed) is not the way to do this.
I'll take DeepL over a clueless human translator any day. ▲ Collapse
| | | | Lieven Malaise
Belgium
Local time: 14:13
Member (2020)
French to Dutch
+ ...
| Isn't that something. | Feb 6, 2023 |
If the whining and complaining of Proz users would generate money for the owners of this website, its headquarters would have been moved to Panama long ago by now.
| | | | Kevin Fulton
United States
Local time: 08:13
German to English
| Some documents don't require human translation | Feb 6, 2023 |
This includes texts without syntactic or idiomatic complexities such as schedules or checklists. Given the volume of many discovery cases which include numerous documents, MT can save time and money by culling out irrelevant material. Newsletters lend themselves to machine translation as well – does an engineering field office in Ohio really need to know the details of the Advent menu at the employee cafeteria at the corporate headquarters in Clermont-Ferrand? The same is true for much email (... See more This includes texts without syntactic or idiomatic complexities such as schedules or checklists. Given the volume of many discovery cases which include numerous documents, MT can save time and money by culling out irrelevant material. Newsletters lend themselves to machine translation as well – does an engineering field office in Ohio really need to know the details of the Advent menu at the employee cafeteria at the corporate headquarters in Clermont-Ferrand? The same is true for much email (Frau X is currently on maternity leave, please contact Frau Y if you have any questions). An attorney in my circle of acquaintances works for a large multinational company. He had to deal with hundreds of email messages in various languages potentially related to a case he was working on. He fed them into a company-internal MT program and in the end got a few dozen that specifically pertained to his case; of those, half required further human translation.
This development, of course, has affected me personally. Early in my career I spent a lot of time translating discoveries (boring!), email (ditto) and newsletters (somewhat less boring). Over the past 10 years work of this type has diminished, replaced often by jobs calling for more rigorous intellectual effort. ▲ Collapse
| | | | | Read the manual | Feb 7, 2023 |
Ice Scream wrote: Philip Lees wrote:
I reckon the rot started with the introduction of the computer. Real translators… Except all those are manual tools and did not replace brainwork, and they were never going to replace any of us.
Just how is a spell checker or a web terminology search a "manual" tool? In any case, I'm happy to have a tool that saves me the tedious "brainwork" of having to track down an obscure abbreviation, or to make sure a bizarre drug name is spelled the same way everywhere.
It seems bizarre to me that anyone would want to start every job by unpicking someone else’s translation rather than creating their own.
Well, I can't speak for anyone but myself, but that's not how I use MT. It's more of a merging process, in which the translation template generated by my own brain takes advantage of the terminology-heavy text created by the MT to save typing time.
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Lieven Malaise
Belgium
Local time: 14:13
Member (2020)
French to Dutch
+ ...
Philip Lees wrote:
Well, I can't speak for anyone but myself, but that's not how I use MT. It's more of a merging process, in which the translation template generated by my own brain takes advantage of the terminology-heavy text created by the MT to save typing time.
Indeed. It's remarkable how people (not coincidently mostly people who never or very rarely make use of MT) apparently tend to think that using MT is equal to 1) not editing the MT at all and thus delivering bad translations, or 2) at least partly shutting off your brain, while the end result depends 100% on the translator.
To me the whole point of MT is learning how to use it in a quality process because, if properly used, it is without a doubt a tool that contributes to quality.
But are we contributing to the end of our profession, then? Maybe, but it is completely laughable that we, translators, would be able to stop that from happening or to make sure that we are the only ones that reap the fruits of AI technology. I always have to laugh if people in these forums, populated by 20-some members (I may be exaggerating a little here), call for translators to refuse globally to use MT (or even CAT tools) any longer. It's ridiculous.
Panta rhei.
[Edited at 2023-02-07 06:57 GMT]
[Edited at 2023-02-07 06:59 GMT]
| | | | | So how does your MT differ? | Feb 7, 2023 |
I’ve had minimal exposure to MT, you’re right, so I’d be interested to know how your usage differs.
I opened a segment and the MT translated the text into English. I could then choose to edit that translation if I wanted to. I didn’t actually translate anything; I just checked the machine’s translation.
I thought that was how it worked. What did I do wrong? How does yours differ from that?
(PS Lieven, I haven’t called for a universal boycott of ... See more I’ve had minimal exposure to MT, you’re right, so I’d be interested to know how your usage differs.
I opened a segment and the MT translated the text into English. I could then choose to edit that translation if I wanted to. I didn’t actually translate anything; I just checked the machine’s translation.
I thought that was how it worked. What did I do wrong? How does yours differ from that?
(PS Lieven, I haven’t called for a universal boycott of technology, I’m just saying I don’t want to miss out on the translation part of the process)
(PPS Philip, again your examples are tools which help us in our work but don’t replace the translation process, the conversion of one language to another in the brain) ▲ Collapse
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Ice Scream wrote:
I opened a segment and the MT translated the text into English. I could then choose to edit that translation if I wanted to. I didn’t actually translate anything; I just checked the machine’s translation.
So while you were waiting for the MT translation you switched off the translation machine in your brain. Why on earth would you do that?
I thought that was how it worked. What did I do wrong? How does yours differ from that?
I leave my internal translation machine running while I'm waiting for the MT. Then I merge the MT's output with my own.
But in any case, this is just the first rough draft. The real creative work comes in the subsequent stages.
(PPS Philip, again your examples are tools which help us in our work but don’t replace the translation process, the conversion of one language to another in the brain)
I would say it's a difference of degree, rather than kind. MT is just spell-checker/autocomplete on steroids.
| | | | Lieven Malaise
Belgium
Local time: 14:13
Member (2020)
French to Dutch
+ ...
Ice Scream wrote:
(PS Lieven, I haven’t called for a universal boycott of technology
I wasn't referring to you specifically. There are others who have called for it in the past few years.
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Lieven Malaise
Belgium
Local time: 14:13
Member (2020)
French to Dutch
+ ...
Philip Lees wrote:
I leave my internal translation machine running while I'm waiting for the MT. Then I merge the MT's output with my own.
Yes, that's exactly how it works. I always first read the source (obviously) and while doing that I'm already converting in my mind or deciding how I will start my sentence. Then comes the MT and I adapt it accordingly or change my mind about certain aspects (there comes the quality factor). Quite often (of course depending on the material you have to translate and perhaps also on your language pairs) there is little to change (there comes the speed factor). Explaining this process, it might seem quite long, but those decisions are a matter of seconds.
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