Machine Translation Is Not Translation

 

In spite of what various snake oil salesmen and saleswomen have been trying to make us believe for many years now, machine translation (MT) does not make it possible for translators to increase their productivity by incorporating MT into their normal translating workflow. The general public generally does not yet understand it, but most translators at this point do understand that the main problem with machine translation is that machine translation is not translation.

MT is a translation tool, just like a dictionary or a bilingual database on Internet, but it is not translation. A bilingual, context based-database on Internet, with whole sentences, sometime accurate, but often not, and even with whole paragraphs that look like a real translation, would be a better description of MT than adding the word “translation” after the first accurate descriptor “machine”.

Sentences processed by MT sometime make sense, and sometime they make no sense. What is even worse is that sometime something that looks like it makes perfect sense is total nonsense. This is why MT cannot be used by translators to “increase their productivity by integrating MT into their work process” as those who need to sell this “linguistic technology” to gullible clients would want us to believe. It takes such a long time to separate the wheat from the chaff during so-called editing of MT, especially when chaff can at first glance look like wheat because “editing” of MT always involves a lot of retranslating, a conditio sine qua non if we want to avoid mistranslation.

But many companies have invested so heavily in machine translation in the hope that eventually they would be able to save the money that they used to have to pay to humans called translators that at this point they may be trapped in a labyrinth of illusions of their own making. (My heart goes out to them, of course).

MT has been 5 years away from becoming “almost as good as human translation” for so long now, at least for the last 5 decades. At this pace, it will still be 5 years away from this resplendent goal for at least the next 5 centuries.

As somebody who has been translating patents from Japanese, German, French and other languages into English for 27 years, I appreciate MT for what it is – an extremely useful tool for translators and non-translators alike. But from my viewpoint, MT is a most wonderful tool especially for translators.

I remember the days when there was no MT in the eighties and nineties. Not only that, the legibility of documents was often horrible when after a second or even third generation fax, Japanese characters that were originally beautifully clear and crisp became but poor shadows of what they used to be, like shadows of ideas on the wall of Plato’s cave.

Digital copy has then finally put an end to this particular torturing of translator’s eyes and brain, and MT has later made it still easier for translators to do their work, for example by quickly locating possible translations of technical terms, or even the correct pronunciations of personal and geographical names, which used to be very difficult to ascertain in Japanese before easy access to MT for the most part solved this and other problems.

At the beginning of 21st century, I consider myself very lucky because like everybody else, I now generally have access to clearly legible copies of documents in foreign languages, especially patents. And before I start translating a patent, I generally print out an MT version of the text in Japanese or another language because it helps me with my work. MT helps me in the same way that a specialized dictionary or a specialized online database helps, but it does not do my work for me.

I look at the printed text quite a bit when I start translating because at that point, I am still formulating in my mind the terms that I will be using, and suggestions from the MT tool are often useful (although they can be also misleading).

If it made sense for me to “edit” the MT-processed text and pretend that it is my own work – hey, I would do it myself! Why not if I could work faster and make more money in this manner?

But it so happens that things don’t work like this in translation, because, as I said at the beginning, while machine translation is a very useful tool, it is not translation. If I tried to edit the MT text, no matter how much and for how long I tried to edit the damn thing, the editing process would necessarily introduce abominations conceived in the brain of a machine into a human translation to such an extent that I would lose all of my clients very quickly.

The only real solution for all of the problems inherent in machine translation is a retranslation.

This is something that is difficult to explain to people who don’t know much about translation, especially since expecting that technology will keep delivering new fantastic miracles to us on a daily basis is deeply rooted now in the very essence of our so-called civilization.

But as more and more people now have direct experience with MT as it is available to anyone for free with access to a computer, tablet or smart phone, I am hoping that fewer people will be giving me the uncomprehending look that I sort of became used to over the years when I try to explain to non-translators why MT is a gift to human translators rather than a curse that will eventually do away with my profession.

As most people have already used MT on their own, or will be using it soon, more and more of them will hopefully start understanding what MT is and what it isn’t.