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Translation platforms cannot replace humans-- but they are still astonishingly useful

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Paulinho Fonseca
Paulinho Fonseca  Identity Verified
Brazil
Local time: 10:16
Member (2011)
English to Portuguese
+ ...
Still useful. May 5, 2017

All in all, GT is a source that can't be denied, and it has improved along the years.

 
Jan Truper
Jan Truper  Identity Verified
Germany
Local time: 14:16
Member (2016)
English to German
Astonishingly useless May 5, 2017

I am often surprised at how useless English to German GT results are when I try it out.

A couple of weeks ago, I had to translate a list of hundreds of minerals, silicate minerals and some chemical elements for a game. I figured GT might be up for this task, since these were straightforward scientific terms without surrounding text, and in most cases, there was only one directly corresponding German option for each English source term.
Many of GT's results for this list were s
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I am often surprised at how useless English to German GT results are when I try it out.

A couple of weeks ago, I had to translate a list of hundreds of minerals, silicate minerals and some chemical elements for a game. I figured GT might be up for this task, since these were straightforward scientific terms without surrounding text, and in most cases, there was only one directly corresponding German option for each English source term.
Many of GT's results for this list were so bad that I dismissed them all – some were downright bizarre, others had been left in English.

(On a related note, I am often surprised at how useful, comprehensive and accurate Wikipedia is for such tasks.)
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Michael Wetzel
Michael Wetzel  Identity Verified
Germany
Local time: 14:16
German to English
No less true for other fields May 5, 2017

Anton Konashenok wrote:

There are fields where this understanding is truly necessary to avoid serious risks - medicine, aviation, nuclear energy, etc. - and human translators without any background in the given field do make stupid mistakes, too.


I would just like to supplement this by adding that there are NO fields where understanding is NOT truly necessary to avoid serious failures, and human translators without any background in the given field do make stupid mistakes, too. (Or, to be fair, translators without any background make lots of amazingly stupid mistakes and translators with background experience make occasional, less schocking mistakes.)

If someone fails to grasp something in an article about an artist or fails to find a way to effectively convey that content in the target language, it is not going to kill anyone. But, at some (relatively early) point, all the effort and money invested in the translation becomes a waste, and whatever the client was hoping to gain through investing in the translation becomes a lost opportunity. The problem described by Siegfried and Anton is no less pressing in fields where no existential risk is involved.

And the worst thing about bad (whether specialist or generalist) translators and MT is that they produce literally unreadable texts. It's one thing to critique a group of five sentences here, but try to actually efficiently and productively read through ten pages of (figuratively or literally) mechanically translated text: It is exhausting and quickly becomes incomprehensible.


 
alex suhoy
alex suhoy  Identity Verified
Ukraine
Local time: 15:16
English to Russian
+ ...
Still useful. May 31, 2017

Still useful.

 
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Translation platforms cannot replace humans-- but they are still astonishingly useful







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