The Real Issue in Machine Translation: Post-Editing

Machine translation has a lot of enemies, although some of them can be even more pedantic than the machines themselves. Some critics, for example, take a paragraph from Joseph Conrad or Henry James and feed it to Babelfish or to some other free machine translation services available online.

The results are often hilarious, but rather than demonstrating that machine translation does not work, they show that critics often don'tt have a clue about the real issues with machine translations. The biggest issue in machine translation of multilanguage advertising, marketing and consumer information is the impossibly high cost of high post-editing.

The fact is, it is often cheaper, and faster to have multilanguage marketing content correctly translated by a literate human to begin with, rather than having it corrected after a machine translation screws it up.

Post-editors take the machine output and transform it into something that can be easily read and understood by human beings, while remaining as faithful as possible to the source text.

Experts agree that the current issue with translation software is about selecting the right texts for the software to work on, and even having the source texts written in such a way that the machine can "understand" them.

This means keeping sentences short, sticking to the Subject-Verb-Object structure, avoiding convoluted syntax and staying away from metaphors and other semantic devices.

Unfortunately, such writing excludes the use of emotional and/or aesthetic context that is the heart of advertising and marketing copy.

There is no credible substitute for a certified multilanguage translation of marketing and advertising materials by a professional translation service like SRF Global Translations. Don't leave English without us.

26-Jun-2006 By BL Ochman