Some Things Are Impossible to Prove Or Disprove

Some things are impossible to prove or disprove.

The existence of God, for example is one of them.

Or so I am told.

On the other hand, some things can be easily proven or disproven with a simple experiment based on a small dose of logical thinking. One of them is the fact that human editing of machine translation is in fact more time-consuming than actual translation from scratch.

It is easy to design an experiment on the basis of sound and logical criteria to prove that human editing of machine translation, even of a relatively very good machine translation, assuming that there is such a thing, takes longer than an actual translation done by a qualified and experienced translator.

Take as an example a translation that you have just finished; in my case it could be for instance a translation of a German or Japanese patent, for example about three thousand words long.

Given that I have been translating patents for a living for more than 30 years, I will boldly assume for the purposes of this post that my translation would be very good and very accurate, ready for publishing on an official website of a patent granting authority, without even minor problems which often occur in most machine translation, but which are relatively easy fixed.

By relatively minor problems I mean for example things like when the software  program does not know how to translate a long German compound noun and simply keeps the long German word in the machine-translated text which is otherwise in English. If the software does not have the answer, it simply keeps the words in the original language. I see this all the time in machine translations of patents from many languages.

Although this is a flaw that is frequently encountered in machine translations of patents, this kind of problem, which may be impossible to solve by machine translation software, is easily fixed within seconds by a human translator who understands the German term and knows the equivalent in another language, without even taking a look at the original text.

But since we are starting with a translation that was obtained from an experienced human translator, the translation would not contain the problems that often crop up in machine translations.

Now let’s assume that in order to simulate one of the problems that could be introduced by machine translation, we would use the search-and-replace function of our word processing program and replace five correct terms in a flawless translation obtained from a human translator with incorrect but perfectly plausible terms.

Problems like this are much more difficult to correct because they can be verified by a human translator only in the context of the original text.

For example, let’s say that for the purposes of the experiment, a translator would replace “tall” with “small, “acceleration” with “deceleration”, “wet” with “dry”, “organic” with “inorganic”, and “is not” with “is”. The word “organic” can be easily mistranslated by machine translation if the software misreads the first letter of the word and the word “not” can be easily overlooked by a machine translation program in a sentence, especially since it is in different positions in the sentence in different languages. And so on and so forth.

If we don’t know where the problem might be hidden, the only way to fix the mistakes that have been introduced into an otherwise perfect translation by non-thinking software is to proofread the translation in the context of the original text, which is to say to painstakingly compare the translation to the original text if not word by word, then at least sentence by sentence.

And as every translator knows, something like that is very time consuming.

Such a comparison, when we know that the translation is likely to contain problems, but don’t know where and what the problems are, would take much longer than if we proofread a translation that was done by a competent human translator, or by ourselves, and we are looking only for minor problems such as omissions and typos.

The “translation industry” likes to pretend that editing of machine translations is a logical next step and a straightforward process that can be easily used to fill in the gaps left in the approach that used machine translation to lower the cost, in conjunctions with humans who are supposed to quickly and in an inexpensive manner fix and clean up the machine translation output.

That is why the “translation industry” generally pays very low rates for proofreading, and the result is that with some exceptions, mostly just “newbies” are willing to do proofreading, even when it comes to translations that were done by human translators.

But the thing is, proofreading is a relatively painless and straightforward procedure only if the mistakes in the human-translated or machine-translated texts were so obvious that we would not need to compare the machine translation to the original, or if such a comparison could be made quickly and relatively infrequently.

Most “post-processors” of machine translations are probably working very quickly and without comparing the machine translation to the original text much for one simple reason: they get paid so little for their mind-numbing drudgery that they can’t really afford to do much more.

The fact is that even if a machine-translated text is post-processed by a human “almost translator” and even if the post-processed result looks a little bit better than a machine translation, the actual mistakes in the machine translation can be discovered only if the human post-processor compares the machine-translated text to the original text sentence by sentence, if not word by word.

As I have said in the introduction, I don’t know whether God exists, because that is something that can be neither proven nor disproven. Generally speaking, I don’t think God exists because it makes no sense to me. There are days when so many good things happen that I kind of have to wonder whether everything has been planned in advance by a benevolent higher power. And there are days when it is obvious to me that everything is controlled by Devil …. which in a way would also be a sort of a proof that God does exist, I suppose.

Call me an agnostic rather than a non-believer.

But one thing that I do know for sure is that post-processed machine translation that are “almost as good as human translations” as the “translation industry” likes to put it do not exist, because that is something that can be proven very easily with the simple test that I have proposed in my post today.

Post-processed machine translations are much more likely to be a poison rather than a cure for the problems that are unavoidable with machine translations.