Jeff Allen has begun an interesting thread on ProZ by linking to a new article on his on machine translation post-editing (What is Post-editing?).
According to Jeff post-editing of machine-translated text would permit to reduce translation time by up to 70%, while producing professional high-quality translations.
In order to achieve such gains, a good procedure needs to be in place, so that the necessary terminological work be done before the MT stage.
Furthermore,the post-editing should be done by a fully qualified professional.
I think this is very important, as it points to a future in which MT translation becomes another tool (although maybe the most important one) in a professional translator's kit: just like, in the past twenty five years or so, our profession has been revolutionized first by the coming of the personal computer, and then by CAT programs.
I am still somewhat reluctant to use machine translation. I have tried myself to utilize it, although, I must admit, the MT program I had was quite cheap and probably not suitable for the kind of tranlsations I do. The greatest obstacle for me is the fact that I love translating from scratch and don't like to edit other people's work including the work of a non-human translation program. Just my 2 cents.
ReplyDeleteWhere's your Atom feed, btw?
My own experience with MT is fairly limited, although sometimes I do use a fairly simple program: I find that in certain limited domains (such as software documentation translation) it actually helps, at least when the SL is written clearly in fairly short sentences.
ReplyDeleteI expect that more professional level programs, coupled with the kind of rigorous procedures that Jeff describes, would actually yield better results, at least in certian fields.
BTW. I've now added a site feed... hope it works (I'm still very new at blogging).
Yes, it works fine. Great. Thanks.
ReplyDelete