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My sister is a professional translator and when companies pay her they generally do it because they want really good translations not because they just want peo

by jvvw 9y ago

My sister is a professional translator and when companies pay her they generally do it because they want really good translations not because they just want people to understand the content. This can be for semi-legalistic reasons (though she's not a legal translator per se, but she has done a fair bit of work related to the EU) or for reasons of professional reputation. Literary translation, although not her mainstay, is also obviously really hard to do well. She's not worried about Google Translate at all yet, although she does have the advantage that one of her languages is rare for native English speakers and she is an extremely good writer in English.

YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
I have a cluster of friends who are professional translators and interpreters and the translators have complained to me a lot about a machine translation program called Trados, that they are pretty much forced to use in their day-to-day jobs. The complaint I heard was that translation agencies hire translators with contracts that state that 80% of the translation work will be performed by Trados and the human translator will only be paid for 20% of it (I obviously don't know exact numbers!). Of course, in practice, Trados' translations are nowhere near 80% of the work needed to translate some text, to the point that the human translator ends up doing the bulk of the work and being paid for only a small fraction of it. It looks like translators are already in trouble with machine translation software, even if they can still do the job way better than that software. I think we can expect to see this pattern a lot more often in the future: automation taking over jobs not because it's better at them, but because it's more profitable that way.
- petepete 9y ago
  The effectiveness of Trados or other MT software is entirely dependent on the quality of the glossaries and translation memories. Both of these are built up over time, the bigger and better (and more specific) they are, the less the translator has to be involved. If independent, having their own glossaries and TMs boost their efficiency and productivity. If they are working on the 20%, improving the company TMs is, in the short term, eating their own profit. In the long term, they are training their own replacement.
- amake 9y ago
  Trados is not a machine translation tool; it is a CAT (computer-aided translation) tool, which helps human translators do their jobs more efficiently. It does not produce translations. Trados may additionally offer MT services, and it probably provides easy access to MT services within the tool, but it's not fair to blame Trados itself for poor translations, as the human must choose what ultimately to output for each input string. > contracts that state that 80% of the translation work will be performed by Trados and the human translator will only be paid for 20% of it This is probably referring again not to MT, but to "leveraging" existing translations. This is basically a lookup (usually with some fuzziness to allow n% matches where e.g. 80% < n < 100%) against a database of existing translations. If you are translating a document that has been translated before, and only x% of it has changed, then it doesn't make sense for the whole thing to be re-translated.

by jvvw 9y ago

YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago

I have a cluster of friends who are professional translators and interpreters and the translators have complained to me a lot about a machine translation program called Trados, that they are pretty much forced to use in their day-to-day jobs. The complaint I heard was that translation agencies hire translators with contracts that state that 80% of the translation work will be performed by Trados and the human translator will only be paid for 20% of it (I obviously don't know exact numbers!). Of course, in practice, Trados' translations are nowhere near 80% of the work needed to translate some text, to the point that the human translator ends up doing the bulk of the work and being paid for only a small fraction of it. It looks like translators are already in trouble with machine translation software, even if they can still do the job way better than that software. I think we can expect to see this pattern a lot more often in the future: automation taking over jobs not because it's better at them, but because it's more profitable that way.

petepete 9y ago
The effectiveness of Trados or other MT software is entirely dependent on the quality of the glossaries and translation memories. Both of these are built up over time, the bigger and better (and more specific) they are, the less the translator has to be involved. If independent, having their own glossaries and TMs boost their efficiency and productivity. If they are working on the 20%, improving the company TMs is, in the short term, eating their own profit. In the long term, they are training their own replacement.
amake 9y ago
Trados is not a machine translation tool; it is a CAT (computer-aided translation) tool, which helps human translators do their jobs more efficiently. It does not produce translations. Trados may additionally offer MT services, and it probably provides easy access to MT services within the tool, but it's not fair to blame Trados itself for poor translations, as the human must choose what ultimately to output for each input string. > contracts that state that 80% of the translation work will be performed by Trados and the human translator will only be paid for 20% of it This is probably referring again not to MT, but to "leveraging" existing translations. This is basically a lookup (usually with some fuzziness to allow n% matches where e.g. 80% < n < 100%) against a database of existing translations. If you are translating a document that has been translated before, and only x% of it has changed, then it doesn't make sense for the whole thing to be re-translated.