| Pages in topic: < [1 2] | "Post-editing" of Machine Translations Thread poster: Jonathan Smith (X)
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| I agree with you, Martín | Oct 19, 2007 |
.... all we have ever asked at proz and faithfully answered may be commercially exploited and sold for millions of galactic drachmas to serve as a huge translation memory...
In fact, I was thinking very seriously about this these last days... who knows...
Regards,
Luciana
[Edited at 2007-10-19 13:36]
| | | | Yaotl Altan 
Mexico
Local time: 04:09
Member (2006)
English to Spanish
+ ...
Marcelo Silveyra wrote:
"we have a low budget" - meaning that you certainly won't get paid enough for the hassle. Avoid at all costs.
I agree with my dear carnalito Marcelo.
- "We have a low budget"
You can answer them: "Hey , these are the big leagues, if you're not competitive, please get out, this is only for professionals"
- "Please be very, very reasonable when quoting"
The totalitarian style is the one I love the most :
- "Remember that we will not allow quotes higher than XXX"
The violin-background music is another trick.
- "We are a NGO"
Really? You visit their site and it's a DOT.COM making profits from the poor. Of course, some of them are not NGO. They are a Ltd.
Machine translation? It's easier to understand my 2 years-old nephew's words.
[Modificato alle 2007-10-19 18:14]
| | | | Odette Grille (X)
Canada
Local time: 06:09
English to French
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| I heard about dirty translations | Oct 19, 2007 |
Hello,
The first time I heard about dirty translations was at the proz. conference in Montreal. Someone having only vague recollection of a language she received a letter in. All she wanted to know was wether she had misunderstood the general purpose of the letter.
Then another translator mentionned using the dirty translation proofreading method. So I tried...It is good enough to know what the message is, but certainly would be laborious to use even with copy paste. Mine was... See more Hello,
The first time I heard about dirty translations was at the proz. conference in Montreal. Someone having only vague recollection of a language she received a letter in. All she wanted to know was wether she had misunderstood the general purpose of the letter.
Then another translator mentionned using the dirty translation proofreading method. So I tried...It is good enough to know what the message is, but certainly would be laborious to use even with copy paste. Mine was a legal doc.
Just today, I posted my thoughts about the database building up in the CAT tools. I had to smile when I read this post a few minutes later ! ▲ Collapse
| | | | Jonathan Smith (X)
Canada
Local time: 06:09
German to English
TOPIC STARTER | Thank you for your comments | Oct 19, 2007 |
Hi everyone,
First of all, thank you very much for your comments. I am more than happy to see such a response. It's also great to have some different views, kudos to those posters.
Just following up, here's a little more information about the poster of this particular job. They claim to be an "agency," but I'm sure we're all experienced with these type of entrepreneurs. Myself, I've outsourced work in the past, too, but I've got a little too much pride to call myself an... See more Hi everyone,
First of all, thank you very much for your comments. I am more than happy to see such a response. It's also great to have some different views, kudos to those posters.
Just following up, here's a little more information about the poster of this particular job. They claim to be an "agency," but I'm sure we're all experienced with these type of entrepreneurs. Myself, I've outsourced work in the past, too, but I've got a little too much pride to call myself and "agency." But hey, maybe I'm just being naive.
Here's a summary of the agencies rates:
ENGLISH GREEK 0.05 0.02
GREEK ENGLISH 0.06 0.03
ENGLISH SPANISH 0.08 0.04
SPANISH ENGLISH 0.07 0.03
ENGLISH FRENCH 0.07 0.03
FRENCH ENGLISH 0.06 0.03
SPANISH FRENCH 0.07 0.04
FRENCH SPANISH 0.08 0.04
GREEK SPANISH 0.08 0.04
SPANISH GREEK 0.07 0.02
GREEK FRENCH 0.07 0.03
FRENCH GREEK 0.06 0.02
Now, the problem I really have with this practice is that many people are going to accept this "post-editing" work. (Notice how this agency states the following in the job listing: please quote your per-page editing price--as if editing a translation and "post-editing" were the same thing.)
In the long run, as translation programs improve, does that mean the end of us poor translators, like so many other craftspeople? Is it a dying trade?
I translate because I love it. It is my passion. "Post-editing" is a completely different ball game. And, I don't want to play. ▲ Collapse
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James McVay
United States
Local time: 06:09
Russian to English
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| MT has it's place, but . . . | Oct 20, 2007 |
More than 30 years ago, when Systran was in its childhood, if not its infancy, I got involved with evaluating MT for my employer. After a colleague and I had spent a few days comparing translations with originals and shaking our heads at the craziness of the language in the translations, we came up with the idea of using the Cloze test technique as an objective way to evaluate the understandability of the translations. If you're not familiar with the Cloze test, the rest of this posting won't ... See more More than 30 years ago, when Systran was in its childhood, if not its infancy, I got involved with evaluating MT for my employer. After a colleague and I had spent a few days comparing translations with originals and shaking our heads at the craziness of the language in the translations, we came up with the idea of using the Cloze test technique as an objective way to evaluate the understandability of the translations. If you're not familiar with the Cloze test, the rest of this posting won't make much sense to you, so look here: http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/~mayer/fifth_dim_website/HTML/cloze_test/cloze_home.html for a short description.
We selected a technical translation, deleted every Nth word, and gave it to a subject matter expert to fill in the blanks. The expert was able to correctly fill in the blanks a surprisingly high percentage of the time.
We concluded that if all you need is a cheap and dirty translation that gives you enough information to decide whether you want to mine the document for usefull data, then MT works fine. Then if you want to know what it really says, have a human translate if from scratch. I still think that makes sense.
I have occasionally used an online MT system to translate short passages in languages with which I have only a nodding acquantance. But hey, I'm a professional and I know what I'm doing. Don't try this at home. ▲ Collapse
| | | | Brigitte Albert (X)
Local time: 06:09
French to English
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| Retranslation for peanuts | Oct 22, 2007 |
Hi Jonathan and colleagues,
I actually replied to this "job" to see what it was all about.... in fact it turned out to be retranslation and we all know how much time it takes to rewrite a first attempt, whether machine-made or not. The pay rate is insulting and I declined the work. I find it very difficult to see why this type of work is admitted to this site...the per/hour rate for the time needed would practically be pennies.
Very disappointed about this coming up on ... See more Hi Jonathan and colleagues,
I actually replied to this "job" to see what it was all about.... in fact it turned out to be retranslation and we all know how much time it takes to rewrite a first attempt, whether machine-made or not. The pay rate is insulting and I declined the work. I find it very difficult to see why this type of work is admitted to this site...the per/hour rate for the time needed would practically be pennies.
Very disappointed about this coming up on prozcom.
All the best to you all,
Brigitte Albert ▲ Collapse
| | | | Jeff Allen
France
Local time: 12:09
Multiplelanguages
+ ...
| MT postediting has been successful, but best practices must be followed | Nov 1, 2008 |
Betty FGC wrote:
I had a bad experience for editing machine translation output, for a web site. Seems that things are not going to the better, I think. One thing that I'm curious is: is there any colleague (in any language pairs) who had the experience near enjoyable, or nearly acceptable?
Betty,
I've seen your question and read through this entire thread of comments on the topic of MT postediting.
1) it seems that the majority of posters in this thread are referring to MT postediting of text which is processed through an free online MT portal. That is not what experienced companies do who have good experience in postediting.
2) Samuel Murray's comment about having a workflow is a key point. All projects (except one small one) in which I have been involved in MT postediting have included a custom dictionary building stage, and the successful ones have involved training of the posteditors on the postediting tasks in a practical way.
3) MT postediting projects have been successful. The MT postediting web site (with a major update this past week) has links to lots of results (including the postedited texts) on the productivity and efficiency of the process. The link is http://www.geocities.com/mtpostediting
There really are best practices to setting up an efficient MT / MT dictionary building / MT postediting cycle. I keep seeing references to jobs and projects over the past year which simply are not investing in the necessary best practices to make MT a part of an efficient translation model. Those companies/agencies who do not follow such steps are simply creating a model which will not work and will require significant re-translation in the postediting steps, whereas several of my case studies have clearly shown that a well-planned MT cycle will significantly reduce such work.
Those who get well-informed on who has been successful with it before, and who put into place a workflow (with training) for the teams to be successful, have been successful with MT postediting. Those who do not are those who are creating all of these projects that cause such resistance among the professional translator community.
Jeff
| | | | Verse 5B (X)
Local time: 12:09
English to Serbian
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Jonathan Smith wrote:
Hi there!
From a recent job listing on ProZ:
"We are looking for translators with experience in the provision of services in the area of translation technology, particularly in the post-editing of machine translation output, able to provide a guaranteed number of post-edited pages of suitable quality within tight deadlines."
I've heard of this before, but it's the first time I've seen such a listing. Just wondering: What are people's thoughts in general on this practice? It would be nice to hear from people who have done it before.
Personally, I don't like the idea. Anyone else?
The volume of work, time and energy a translator will involve in sweeping up a machine translation is the same, if not bigger, than that he would involve in creating a translation without any machine. The employer who offers such a deal definitely fancies getting a translation at a lower rate thinking he will provide you with a half work done. Yes, right, what he will provide is a load of gibberish and confusing syntactic constituents.
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