Online Translation Vs Human Translators

 

Sometime back I was looking for what the statement in German would mean in English. Normally I turn to my daughter who is pursuing

German and Korean recently for any of the translations required for my work and writings. At this age she is  conversant with almost 7 languages. So she is live thesaurus for me. 

However, I see many of my colleagues and friends tend to go to free web sites for their quick translation of sentences.

If you’ve ever taken a foreign language course, teachers and professors always remind students not to use online Translation as a tool for completing assignments. Still, many students go ahead and put their English essays into the online translation websites in order to get their nicely translated Spanish or italian essay out to impress the teachers and examiners. Students or professionals forget that in most cases it's most evident that student or professional has used an online translator like Google Translate or some other sites for the translation as translation is inaccurate and ungrammatical.

Online translation not only impact professional translators in the language service industry, but rather anyone who chooses to use it as a translation tool. Certainly, online public access to a free, quick, and relatively accurate translation method represents significant progress in translation technology. But when one directly compares translation quality and accuracy using Google Translate with that of an experienced human translator, there is no real comparison.

The way that online translation works is that it uses frequency of word pairs between two languages as a database for translations. Although this works well in some cases, often this means that it cannot put a translation into proper context without the help of a human. In fact, it may in some circumstances come up with outright errors or extremely awkward literal translations. While these can often be amusing, there is nothing funny about making mistakes on serious business document translations or when critical information is communicated incorrectly. So what are the pros and cons of Google 

So, online  translate vs. professional translation, lets explore what are pros and cons of this online translation. 

Pros

1. Majority of Online Translation websites are free. An experienced professional translator can sometimes be costly, but remember you get what you pay for.

2. Online Translate is quick. One of the main advantages of Online Translation is that it is very Fast. Just copy paste the text in web site and you get translation in side window within fraction of second. In fact, a human translator(s) cannot compete with the speed websites translates. On an average workday an experienced translator can translate 1500 - 2,000 words maximum (Apprx 500 words/hour) depending on the difficulty of the text. In contrast, Online  Translation is able to produce a translation with the same number of words in just seconds!

3. Online Translation uses  statistical method to form an online translation database based on language pair frequency. 

Cons

1. With online Translation the meaning can be “lost in translation” because there is no way to incorporate context. The complexity of the text, as well as any context which cannot be interpreted without a true knowledge of the language, makes the likelihood of errors greater. 

2. The quality of translation is dependent on the language pair. Which source and target languages are involved also affects the quality of the translation. Since many online translation sites uses web-based translation database built primarily from existing online translations. common translations for languages e.g. Spanish or English tend to be more accurate while translations for other languages that are not as available in their web database are less likely to be accurate.

3. Online  Translation often produces translations that contain significant grammatical errors and some times awkward situations. Just couple of examples the damage the online creates - The phrase “Me estas tomando el pelo” means “you’re kidding” in Spanish, but Google translates this as “Νέου Πλάκα μου κάνεις” in Greek or “New Kidding” in English.  Of course this is not a terribly damaging error, just cause for confusion. There is one more serious mistake in online Translation, A while back, presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton gave Sergey Lavrov, Russian Foreign Minister, a gift representing a “resetting” of the relationship between the U.S. and Russia. But instead of saying “reset” in Russian as was intended, the translation on the gift said “overcharge” in Russian. Needless to say, it was a bit embarrassing for the U.S. government. Though one another hindi to English translation created horrible situation when hindi text had "Shiv Ling". 

5. Online Translation does not have a system to correct for translation errors. There is no way of reporting errors in order to avoid having them repeated, nor is there a way to proof read what has been translated unless one is fluent in both the source and the target language.

Now that we have listed pros and cons with some funny and serious examples OF online Translation – DO THE PROS OUTWEIGH THE CONS?

So as you can see the pros and cons of google translate make it clear that, although you may sometimes have success using online Translation, you would not want to use it for anything of great importance without checking to make sure that there are no errors in context, grammar or otherwise. That is a job for a professional translator. If there is no other choice and you need to translate something which will not impact your life or business in any major way then go ahead and take the help online Translation. Or if you must use online translation, make sure that you have a native speaker proof read and review the text!

Rashit