Thread: What are Translators Saying About Machine Translation

Hi everyone!

I found an interesting article about Machine Translation that I want to share with all of you:

So why insist on using a machine for translating documents? One of the main reasons is that translating by machine plus a thorough post-editing often takes much less time than translating from scratch, and the results are of comparable quality.

I'm really interested in Machine Translation, but since I'm not a translator, I want to know what are your thoughts about it.

Have you ever did Post Editing or some work with Machine Translation involved in the process?
Do you think that Translators and Machines Translation can work together?
Are you ready to become a Post Editor?
Do you think that Machine Translation Quality is getting better?

Cheers

P.S: What is Post Editing? “is the process of improving a machine-generated translation with a minimum of manual labor” (Source: Postediting in Practice | Best practices | TAUS - Enabling better translation)

Hi AriSanguinetti,

In my experience, MT works just fine when it comes to Spanish into English for Legal texts.. But not the other way around- for now. I do believe its getting better every minute, though.
When into Spanish, it still needs a lot of work.. Its easier to just re- translate the text, than to use it in some cases.. But its not the rule, of course.

J.

For me it's been the same. I had very good experiences with MT from Spanish to English but the other way around it was just easier to re-translate.
Is possible that besides the differences in language structure that one of the reasons for this has to do with the fact that MT historically has been used more to translate to English and therefore MT engines are a lot more "trained" to deliver a translation of far better quality?

It's just a thought I had. I honestly think, though that MT is getting better, I've post-edited for quite some time and find that there have been improvements made.

My experience is very similar to marielaer's and joselas'. I've also found that machine translation into English is much better than into Spanish. In my opinion, the reason is because, grammatically speaking, English structures are more fixed and predictable than Spanish and that's why it delivers a better quality output. Anyway, it's only a question of time: both for machine translation output to get better and better in all languages, and for us translators to get used to post-editing.

Thanks to all of you for sharing your experiences!

It would be great if you could specify which engine have you used. Now, I'm testing a DOmY implementation with the EuroParl Corpus.

Saludos!

I only used Google, alone or combined with Trados 2009 if I had a good TM, from Spanish into English. In other language pairs, I didnt even bother, cause the result without trados was quite disastrous (Ex: English into Spanish) so it made no sense to me at the time.

I will write if I get the opportunity of trying sth new. Is there a trial version of what you say you are testing for us to try it out too?

J.

I have only used Google, as joselas.

Hi AriSanguinetti,

Are there any other MTs like google that you can try for free? Or trial versions at least?
Let us know

J.

Hello AriSanguinetti,
There are many translation tools available on web. But, I personally don't trust on machine translations. Machine translation tools cannot beat human translations.

Hi Ari,

i'm the one who tried the Chinese to English translation with machine translator. but my work went in vein. i can tell that machine translation is worth only for single word translation. but when coming to paragraph or document translation it doesn't fit. this is because only trained translator knew the tricks and apt meaning of the word. machine translation may sometime put you in trouble by using restricted words. so i always relay on professional translators for efficient translation.