While machine translation may increase productivity by providing systematic and quick translation turnaround times, only humans can ascertain the suitability of a translation for a particular audience or culture.

With the increasing popularity and accessibility of web-based machine translation tools, some have begun to question if human translators are indeed essential for the language translation process. In short, can the work of human translators be better accomplished by a machine?

According to Chanin Ballance, President & CEO of viaLanguage, decades of research have resulted in the development of computer systems that can quickly translate from one language to another, by “deconstructing text components such as the punctuation marks, recognized idioms, single word terminology, and sentence structure and then reconstructing these in the target language by applying specific linguistic rules and ‘learning’ from already existing translations.”

Ms. Ballance points out that while all these computer system advances may sound promising, we mustn’t forget that computers are incapable of successfully resolving the many ambiguities and complex rules that are so much a part of languages.

“As all translators know, the process of translation involves much more than simply replacing the source word with the target language word. This process involves using cultural, grammatical, syntactic and semantic knowledge in order to interpret the real meaning and ensure that it makes sense to native readers.” She writes.

Ballance concludes that machine translations offer an attractive package for users, ensuring speedy, systematic and consistent translations. However, while human translators are considerably slower, only humans can determine the actual suitability of a translation in a given context, by making experience-based linguistic and style choices, instead of simply relying on a computer database.

Alex Dupont

See Also

• More about machine translation
  Machine Translation in itself is not good enough if you require a translation of publishable quality. You may have to consider human translation if you require high quality
• Translation in the New Millennium: I, Translator by Chanin Ballance (B2B Marketing)
  With all the new developments and increasing accessibility of electronic translation tools such as machine translations, some have argued that these technologies will eventually replace the human translator.