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A spectre is haunting the translation industry – the spectre
of machine translation. As the fear to be driven out of the marketplace is
advancing inland further into the heart of every business due to the technological
developments, translators are also having their fair shares of this fear – the
machines taking our jobs!
How we’ve been dealing with this challenge is projecting what
seems to be going to happen to us. Most of the professional comments I’ve read
so far indicate that a big part of the market is still unable to predict what
the future holds for us. We are just hiding our fears by laughing away the incompetent
results of neural machine translations.
Some claim that MT still has a long way –several decades– to
go until human translators are expelled and forced out of the market, but how
much headway MT has made over the past decades is ignored, let alone its
potential to be a tool indistinguishable from human translators.
But should we really be afraid of MT? Will it really take
our jobs? My guess differs both from the optimistic view and the apocalyptic
approach. What we are talking about is not only MT, but a whole series of
technological developments, which have actually contributed greatly to our
profession, facilitating a faster and more efficient service.
Remember the times when we were deprived of digital
dictionaries, and had to go through the pages of printed dictionaries? Back in
early 2000’s when I did my first translation, I had but a free edition of a dictionary
program installed in my computer, which didn’t have the word “conundrum.” Having to refer to the
printed dictionaries on a constant basis was much of the workload. Now thanks
to the daily-updated online dictionaries, many time-consuming tasks have
been eliminated, which means we have more time to produce more, thus to make more
money.
Another life-easing development for translators is the invention
of Translation Memory. These softwares,
called CAT tools, are great to save time, bringing back translated segments from
the depths of our memory of translation
experience, and offering us the
chance to use (copy) the relevant (matching) parts we have done in the past.
So, technology has always worked to the benefit of translators,
not vice versa. And it is worth noting that translators, who can use CAT tools,
are more in demand recently, and it seems that they will be demanded more
often in the coming years.
The industry has changed immensely, transitioning from using
pen, paper and printed material to online dictionaries, word processors and CAT
tools. In that transition, it was not the translators but the translation tools
that lost their jobs. Now it seems technology is coming to take jobs of the
translators who insist sticking with conventional tools. (Do you know any
translator who still uses a typewriter?) We did not complain about using digital
tools that allowed us translate faster, so why complain about the biggest development
in the industry?
I know that MT is different than others. The other tools
didn’t threaten to replace us, instead they helped us. But MT has an eye on us.
Once it is ready to fulfill a translator’s task in its entirety, human translators
won’t be needed anymore. I will not argue that it is not possible. Quite the
contrary, it is possible. But in this
ceteris paribus scenario, it is assumed
that the market size is constant with its current diversity of fields.
Some suggest that MT can only work well in areas, where style
matters less such as technical, IT, engineering, medical or legal as opposed to marketing,
literature or philosophy. If we consider CAT tools to be part of this market transformation,
which will eventually avail a perfect machine translation, then we should also
remember that still the most demanded areas are legal, medical, engineering and
IT.
With the advent of technology, there will be new tools, but
also new markets and new needs. 30 years ago, subtitling TV shows or translation
of games didn’t have a huge market presence as today. Foreign trade meant only sales
of goods in large quantities back then, now online retail sales networks have seeped into each household. We can be an endangered species as translators, but as
laborers of words we can escape total annihilation. What we need to do is not
worry about the eventual fate of a craft, but adopt the change and be prepared.
I think what you published made a lot of sense.
ReplyDeleteHowever, what about this? what if you added a little content?
I am not suggesting your content isn't solid, however what if you added a
title that makes people desire more? I mean "The Spectre of Machine Translation" is a
little vanilla. You should peek at Yahoo's front page and see how they create news titles to grab
viewers to open the links. You might try adding a video
or a pic or two to get people excited about
what you've written. In my opinion, it would bring your website a little livelier.
Thank you for your advice and sorry for this very late reply.
DeleteAs a matter of fact, I am not seeking publicity and this blog isn't a marketing tool for me (I know it could be). But I appreciate your insight. It's really helpful and I will consider it in my future entries :)
First of all I apologize for this very late reply and thank you very uch for reading my blog.
ReplyDeleteI am sorry I don't know how blogger manages notifications. I do not have any control over subscriptions. Maybe there is an unsubscribe link in the notification email.
Thank you very much for your comment and please accept my apologies for this late reply.
ReplyDeleteI guess it's a habit. I, for one, failed to get the feel of e-readers. The same applies for newspapers, I presume :)