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Machine translation has made it possible for companies to adapt more than ever to the needs of their customers by transferring information into the target language. A large amount of text to be translated into another language is no longer extremely difficult, as long as you have an appropriate machine translation solution and a skilled translator to post-edit the text.
However, just as every translation method has its pros and cons, so does machine translation. Namely, machine translation is suitable for translating texts that do not have any local social context.
What text is suitable for machine translation?
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There is no universal answer to this question. But there are types of text that are likely to be suitable for machine translation and there are types of text that almost certainly will not. Generally, the less context and cultural references in the source text, the more suitable it will be for machine translation. If the text uses common vocabulary, short, simple sentences, simple lists of terms, and minimal or no specialized terminology, a machine translation program will usually produce good, usable results. But even so, the translations will almost always contain errors and they will not sound like the usual language we speak, so such texts require post-editing of the text.
Texts such as various types of instructions, manuals, safety conditions, product descriptions, company internal communication texts or document translation, and sometimes it is also applied to the translation of application software (provided that the text does not contain any local cultural references, etc.) Often, exactly this type of text is very voluminous, thus, when translating it to a person, the translation process is long and quite complicated. However, machine translation and text proofreading the “team” can translate such texts more efficiently!
Why hasn’t everyone been using a translator for a long time?
The last stumbling block, because of which a machine translation cannot be used always and everywhere, is, of course, the quality of the translation. Although machine translation technologies have improved significantly over time, raising the quality of translated texts as well, for some text types they are not comparable to human translated and localized text. It should always be remembered that a machine translator is an excellent translator, but it is unable to grasp complex cultural contexts, it is unable to read the socio-political current affairs of a specific target country, which can throw off the entire text. It is for this reason that machine translation is not suitable for any type of marketing materials, press releases, advertising slogans, radio jingle texts, etc., because such texts require special attention and are not only translated, but also localized, sometimes even without preserving the original translation. of the word, but only of the idea.
Interpreters also learn
That’s right – machine translators are also capable of learning. The work is not finished just by creating the translation software – the machine translator must be regularly trained with different types of texts, they must be corrected so that the machine translator, seeing the corrections, will not make the mistakes made before the next time. For example, the machine translator created by Linearis translations has been learning every day for several years. Currently, machine translators have learned to translate texts from certain industries so accurately that post-editing the text takes less and less time, perceiving it more as a text check, which does not allow the bar of quality to slide down compared to human translated texts.
Linearis translations is a translation agency that offers a wide range of translation services, from simple text translations to text and multimedia content localization, up to simultaneous interpreting at events, notarized translations and more and more! The company’s 18-year experience allows us to recommend the most suitable solution to each client, so if you don’t know what is really needed to make the translation more successful, the experienced experts will advise you.