Human Translation in the Age of Machine Translation

I have been writing on the topic of machine translation and how MT is likely or unlikely to influence human translation for a very long time now. This was one of the subjects that I used to discuss endlessly with many commenters on my silly blog for more than ten years now. But even before I published my first post on my blog, I used to write among other subjects about machine translation for publications for translators online and on paper since the early nineties, for example online on the Translation Journal, on paper in the ATA Chronicle, the Translorial (publication of the Northern California Translators Association), the Gotham Translator (publication of the New York Circle of Translators), and other publications.

Some of my predictions turned out to be not exactly accurate, to put it mildly and gently. I definitely underestimated how quickly would MT be getting better after its pitiful beginnings once it became widely available for commercial purposes some three decades ago.

MT is of course much better now than three or two decades ago. It is so good now that it removed from my desk and the desks of other human translators a fairly large portion of material that we used to be translating in the BMT era (the era Before Machine Translation, which incidentally lasted several thousand years). Because of that, I don’t know whether I would be even able to pay my bills now from translation alone. Possibly not.

Fortunately, I am retired now, I was able to downsize and my two pensions are more than sufficient to pay the bills, which are fewer and smaller now. But I still work, mostly just because I like to work, although also because I like the money, of course. So, what kind of work does this human translator do now, and why all of this work has not been swallowed yet completely by MT?

I still translate mostly patents, and there is still a considerable amount of patent translation work for which MT is and will be mostly useless for a very long time, definitely for a longer time than what is still left for me on this planet, I think. So why are some of my clients, mostly patent law firms, spending even now thousands of dollars for human translations of patent documents for which very good machine-translated version are and have been available for free for decades? I don’t ask them, of course, I’m just glad that they still keep me busy.

There are several main reasons for the need for human translations of patent documents that I can think of; one group of them is related to the form in which the patents were published a relatively long time ago, by which I mean mostly legibility problems rendering MT unusable, while the other one is related mostly to the purpose for which a translation is to be used.

Legibility Problems

I sometime receive very poorly legible Japanese patents or utility models for translation that are 30, 40, or 50 years old or even older. Back in the sixties and seventies for example, Japanese utility models in particular were printed out by an applicant using a noisy dot matrix printer or later a fuzzy thermal printer and then faxed to the Japan Patent Office (JPO) to be filed. The legibility of the documents received at the JPO was good enough for the eyes of the Japanese employees, so they accepted and published the documents on the JPO website “sono mama” (as they were).

But because even the best MT package developed more than half a century later is completely useless when it is unable to read the fuzzy characters, these kinds of old documents sometime still end up on my desk. Not even the best algorithm can figure out what an illegible blob in a series of Japanese characters is supposed to mean. I can’t really see the illegible character either, but after 33 years, this human translator simply knows, or thinks he knows, what it has to mean for the whole thing to make sense. There is still a big difference between a human brain and a machine’s algorithm and that will never change.

Problems with Unreliability of Machine Translations

The other kind of patent documents this human patent translator receives relatively often are recent or brand-new patent applications that every machine translation package would have no problem processing, but that still need to be processed by human brain because of their purpose.

The clients sometime even include already with the document for translation also a machine translation available for free on the patent office website of the JPO, EPO (European Patent Office), or WIPO (World Intellectual Property Office) websites, or on official patent office websites of the respective countries.

I am not sure whether the clients send me the prior art documents for translation because they simply don’t trust MT, or whether legally they cannot hold their discussions of the minute but extremely important differences between the designs described in American, Japanese, or German patents on the basis of pseudo-documents created by machines. It is probably a mixture of both.

Although in these cases a “pretty good” machine translation is available to me as it is to my clients, it actually takes me significantly longer to translate these patents because I have to try to maintain consistency with the machine-translated text as much as possible. When I translate without an MT backup, I follow in my mind only two trains of thought: the original text and the text that I am creating in my head. When I need to compare these two trains of thought to an MT pseudo-document while trying to catch every mistake in it, it naturally slows me down. But it is interesting work anyway, although as I said, the translation usually takes a long time. Just because MT-generated text looks very, very good, it does not mean that the “translation” is actually accurate. Unless and until the text is “validated” by being processed through the brain of an experienced human translator, it cannot really be called a translation, which is why I call such “documents” pseudo-translations.

A special subcategory of patent documents that should never be translated with MT only are translations of patent applications that are used to file in English a patent application that was originally filed in another language.

I never get these kinds of translations of Japanese patent applications, called for filing, as opposed to translations of patents for information or prior art research. I understand they are being done mostly in Japan. But some years I receive in addition to translations of patent applications for prior art research quite a few requests for translations for filing of patent applications from German.

Just after I had filed for retirement during a slow period two and a half years ago, a new client found out about my services and I was suddenly swamped with translations of German patents for filing that I was receiving from a law firm for close to a year in a field that I particularly enjoy. Had I known that this would happen, I would have waited a little bit longer to further increase my retirement income. But unfortunately, I had no idea.

It would be very dangerous to use MT for translations that are used for filing, foolish even, because mistakes generated by a machine in conjunction with an algorithm could eventually prove very costly to the owner of the patent rights. I don’t think many patent law firms would dare to use MT for filing the text of a patent in English in United State or in Europe, but how do I know what is happening in the mad universe of machine and human translation these days?

I am just a lowly peon who has been translating patents for profit and for fun for over 33 years, and I consider myself very fortunate that nowadays the for-fun part is even more important to me than the profit.

The Water Keeps on Flowing, a folk song from Slovakia about two former lovers.