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    Wednesday, December 30, 2009

    Want to know more about Machine Translation?



    Very interesting Dotsub video: Localization and Translation Thailand 2009 Day 2 Beyond Machine Translation: Collaboration, Integration, Quality, Change and Jobs - Dion Wiggins, CEO, Asia Online
    How come the Machine Translation industry, failing consistently during 50 years, still survives: because demand is there, and growing exponentially every day.

    We should not be afraid of Machine Translation: it is what it is for. Human translation can only reach a fraction of what needs to be translated.

    Not that I agree with the fact that if you need translation, MT + Post editing will do the trick:
    If you need quality, please oh please, trust professional translators!

    3 comments:

    1. Thanks for taking the time to watch my presentation. I would like to respond to your comment above.

      Not that I agree with the fact that if you need translation, MT + Post editing will do the trick:
      If you need quality, please oh please, trust professional translators!

      One of the key points I made in the presentation is that human should nearly always be involved. Machine Translation is a tool to enhance human productivity, not to replace them. Its not a choice of MT or Human, its MT and Human. Typical productivity gains on regular text such as manuals, novels etc are around 250-300% productivity gains - i.e. from 2000-3000 words per day up to 9,000 words per day or even greater. If the text is extremely technical, such as patents, studies has shown that productivity can be increased by 1,000 percent. This is because nearly all the technical terms are already translated well.

      I agree if you want quality, you should trust a professional translator, but how that professional translator executes the translation task at hand is what is the change in the market now. MT now has reached a quality level where it can be a true performance enhancer. This was not the case just 2 year ago.

      Regards

      Dion Wiggins,
      CEO, Asia Online
      ReplyDelete
    2. Hi Dion,

      Thank you so much for your comment and clarification.
      Thanks to your company for the continuous effort to transmit your view point and work on improving the industry.

      Víctor
      ReplyDelete
    3. Victor -- Glad you posted this. Allow me to throw in my two cents worth:

      MT can be extremely helpful in telling a researcher which document (or part of a document) is really important and needs to then be translated by a professional. If MT allows people to confidently ignore irrrelevant material and confidently spend money on translation only after the value is confirmed (through MT) then it may actually contribute to increased HT volume.

      - Bob Donaldson
      Carson Strategy Group
      ReplyDelete

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