| Pages in topic: [1 2] > | Poll: Do you feel threatened by machine translation software? Thread poster: ProZ.com Staff
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This forum topic is for the discussion of the poll question "Do you feel threatened by machine translation software?".
This poll was originally submitted by AngelaMaria
View the poll here
A forum topic will appear each time a new poll is run. For more inform... See more This forum topic is for the discussion of the poll question "Do you feel threatened by machine translation software?".
This poll was originally submitted by AngelaMaria
View the poll here
A forum topic will appear each time a new poll is run. For more information, see: http://proz.com/topic/33629 ▲ Collapse
| | | | Nicole Schnell 
United States
Local time: 23:56
English to German
+ ...
In memoriam | 11.2% voted YES already. | Jan 3, 2006 |
This is scary. Why?
| | | | | The speed of technology is scary | Jan 3, 2006 |
With all the things we have accomplished so far, don't you think that we may be close to the development of good machine translation?
| | | | Nicole Schnell
United States
Local time: 23:56
English to German
+ ...
In memoriam | All technology can never replace a human brain. | Jan 3, 2006 |
No software ever can outsmart the people who developed it. So far we haven't taught our cars to drive by themselves. As long as there isn't any software offering "localizing factor", "humor factor", "soul factor", "ethics factor", (the list is endless), I am not too worried. Not to mention "personal style".
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| Been there! Done that! | Jan 3, 2006 |
I postedited machine translation for over 10 years as part of my full-time job, and one day, lo and behold, I discovered that it didn't help me at all. I'm sure it will eventually die on the vine for several reasons:
(1) Without postediting by a good translator, it's too scrambled to use for most purposes.
(2) Postediting is more error-prone than translation-from-scratch. All kinds of serious mistakes can creep in unnoticed by anyone but a professional translator.
(3) Po... See more I postedited machine translation for over 10 years as part of my full-time job, and one day, lo and behold, I discovered that it didn't help me at all. I'm sure it will eventually die on the vine for several reasons:
(1) Without postediting by a good translator, it's too scrambled to use for most purposes.
(2) Postediting is more error-prone than translation-from-scratch. All kinds of serious mistakes can creep in unnoticed by anyone but a professional translator.
(3) Postediting is both labor-intensive and SLOWER that translation-from-scratch.
The few jobs for which it is cost-efficient (mainly multi-million-word technical manuals) are boring and repetitive -- not fun, and they don't pay very well.
[Edited at 2006-01-04 05:49]
[Edited at 2006-01-04 05:52]
[Edited at 2006-01-04 06:34] ▲ Collapse
| | | | Nicole Schnell
United States
Local time: 23:56
English to German
+ ...
In memoriam | Thank you, Muriel! | Jan 3, 2006 |
for this statement!
You summarized it brilliantly.
Best regards,
Nicole
| | | | | Muriel Vasconcellos said it all | Jan 3, 2006 |
.. well nearly.
I work with one of the "smallest of the world's major languages", and I can see translators will be needed for many generations to come.
The population of Denmark is about 5 million, and then there are people outside Denmark who understand Danish ... but it is still a relatively rare language.
Resources are spent on it - not enough according to the authorities, but the EU helps and it is a rich country with a well-educated population, and th... See more .. well nearly.
I work with one of the "smallest of the world's major languages", and I can see translators will be needed for many generations to come.
The population of Denmark is about 5 million, and then there are people outside Denmark who understand Danish ... but it is still a relatively rare language.
Resources are spent on it - not enough according to the authorities, but the EU helps and it is a rich country with a well-educated population, and the language is still actively used in all domains.
Machine translation is a catastrophe or a joke, in spite of all this.
People travel, take part of their education in other countries, learn foreign languages as a matter of course, and then 'play' with their own language as every generation has done since the dawn of humanity...
Words are invented, meanings shift, and the best translators I know are very modest people who are aware that they can't keep up, so they avoid the worst errors.
Machines can never predict where language is going next year, so they will always be a step behind the humans.
And if the computer industry does manage to make machines that can translate between the major languages with resources, they will still need to work through all the permutations and combinations with minor languages, which will NOT all die out... and by then the major languages like English will be fragmented and developed into something the first generation of machines can't recognise reliably ...
There are simply not enough computer geeks to program it, folks. Straight translating is more fun than juggling with the digital calculations. If you allow for a few farmers to grow food, builders and engineers to build houses and computers ...
No, I don't feel threatened - Happy Translating!
Here's a link to another forum:
http://www.proz.com/topic/40815
and for those who can understand Danish -
http://www.proz.com/topic/33308
Don't worry if you can't understand the supposed Danish translation - most Danes would be really challenged too
[Edited at 2006-01-04 07:13] ▲ Collapse
| | | | Williamson
United Kingdom
Local time: 07:56
Flemish to English
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Not yet. But by 2020 the integration of office, dragon dictate,CAT and M.T. and linguistic databases will be a fact.
What then?
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Nicole Schnell
United States
Local time: 23:56
English to German
+ ...
In memoriam | To Williamson: | Jan 3, 2006 |
Still not worried. It is YOU, who is going to use those tools to ease and speed up work. They won't and can not replace you.
| | | | | To Williamson, bis | Jan 3, 2006 |
Williamson wrote:
Not yet. But by 2020 the integration of office, dragon dictate,CAT and M.T. and linguistic databases will be a fact.
What then? All those tools are fine. they will help us do better work, and that's great! But I believe that machine translation, on the opposite, neither helps us nor threatens us.
I fully agree with Nicole, Muriel and even more with Christine: surely someday machine translation will be improved, but this is not soon to come and then it'll be only for the most common and similar languages, such as English-French. Considering what currently exists and the structure of languages, I find it hard to imagine any good machine translation for my other pairs.
| | | | Fred Neild (X)
English to Spanish
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| Linguistic databases | Jan 3, 2006 |
Williamson wrote:
Not yet. But by 2020 the integration of office, dragon dictate,CAT and M.T. and linguistic databases will be a fact.
What then?
Imagine a machine trying to surf through KudoZ?
They have already built machines to play against the greatest chessmasters of the world, but machine translation is far from matching even limited translators. This is how complex languages are.
Current technology doesn't scare me. I am sure mankind will get there, eventually, but it will need a major breakthrough, maybe nanotechnology? Who knows? All I know is I won't be around (earth).
Fred
| | | | | I don't feel threatened but... | Jan 3, 2006 |
many people (not translators naturally)"believe" in their power. I mean that unfortunately there are lots of people I know that translate their site by means of a machine translation software. I've tried many times to explain them that it can be a good translation at all, but my advice doesn't seem to work!!
Actually they don't know English (as well another foreign language) and they simply see their site is translated.
this fact scares me and not the softwares...
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Williamson
United Kingdom
Local time: 07:56
Flemish to English
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| Female is beautiful | Jan 3, 2006 |
especially if it is a female robot, which looks like a real woman.
Meet Actroid, a Japanese "female" robot complete with kimono and equipped with speech recognition in four languages.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/4577632.stm
Add that to improved technology and the role of translators might be reduced to... In 1980 the first pc had 16kb ram... and how m... See more especially if it is a female robot, which looks like a real woman.
Meet Actroid, a Japanese "female" robot complete with kimono and equipped with speech recognition in four languages.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/4577632.stm
Add that to improved technology and the role of translators might be reduced to... In 1980 the first pc had 16kb ram... and how much is that today...
[Edited at 2006-01-03 16:29] ▲ Collapse
| | | | nickname (X)
English to Italian
+ ...
Nicole Schnell wrote:
This is scary. Why?
I set up my own activity as freelancer less than one year ago and I'm not at all scared or somehow threatened; there is a huge difference between a translation done by a machine and another one done by an individual. The contribution we give to the work is the element that makes the difference.
I'm rather puzzled by the yes percentage.
| | | | | not threatened either | Jan 3, 2006 |
Romina 74 wrote:
many people (not translators naturally)"believe" in their power. I mean that unfortunately there are lots of people I know that translate their site by means of a machine translation software. I've tried many times to explain them that it can be a good translation at all, but my advice doesn't seem to work!!
Actually they don't know English (as well another foreign language) and they simply see their site is translated.
this fact scares me and not the softwares...
you can have them translate something from English back to their native language to help them see the quality (or lack of actually) of the translation. That's what I do when I want to make someone realize that machine translation is good only if you want to get the general meaning of the text. And when someone asks me to review a text that has obviously been translated with some software, I ask them for the original version and make it clear that the job will be more expensive if I don't have it because I will need to try and figure out what the original text was. So far it's worked, and I think most non-translators who have talked to me about this issue have lost their faith in machine translation (for quality work that is).
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