Thank you to to all who write Mox (mox@ingenierotraductor). He loves to receive emails but please note that he's slow at answering them.
Friday, September 7, 2012
15 Advantages of post-editing machine translation
Thank you to to all who write Mox (mox@ingenierotraductor). He loves to receive emails but please note that he's slow at answering them.
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I missed you, Mox!
ReplyDeleteLet's all agree on not charging anything less than usual translation rates for MT:ed texts. A client performing a machine translation and sending for "editing" does not add any value, in relation to a normal assignment. Translators can easily perform the MT themselves, if they find it suitable or timesaving (which can be debated per se).
ReplyDeleteHence no reason to give clients discount for it.
/Mårten
My aim is to charge more for GT cleanup. I'm seriously thinking of actually notifying clients: "If it turns out that this job you claim you wrote yourself in English is actually a product of Google Translate, the rate will double." Because you can so tell when it's written by a human being whose English isn't the greatest and who sometimes pick the wrong word out of a dictionary, and when it's been done by a senseless machine.
ReplyDeleteUh... that's "picks", of course...
ReplyDeleteOften faster (and less stressful) to retranslate from scratch...
ReplyDeleteIt can be, yes. However, I have also come across cases where machine translation has improved production speeds in a way not detrimental to the quality of the finished product. Regardless, it's happening whether we want it to or not. At my translation company and elsewhere, customized machine translation is used as a way to win new clients by charging less for the service we perform.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous (the one commenting on September 7, 2012 8:31 PM), your comment speaks for itself, if you have checked for yourself the quality of the "finished product" ("finished product"?!?!?!?), I can understand, by the way you (try to) express yourself in English, that you might have found it acceptable. Please tell us which is your translation agency, so as to avoid it!!! You should improve your English skills before posting this kind of comments
ReplyDeleteWhoa, I didn't say I was happy about the situation, did I? I merely observed that machine translation is in certain cases able to speed up proper translation without lowering quality. The program that my company uses is set up so that it performs reasonably well when faced with technical terms, though it's often laughably bad when faced with even slightly complex syntax. And what on Earth is causing you to lose your marbles over "finished product"? Are you shocked that translation can be viewed as a business and not solely a labour of love? Or do you truly believe that "finished product" makes no sense in this context? Regardless, you might want to check your own sentence structure because you haul off and accuse someone else of not being able to write proper English. I mean, I know that's a risk I run whenever I post on the Internet, but I guess I just assumed that a fellow-translator blog like this one would be troll-free.
ReplyDeleteOh, by the way: I should probably stress one very important thing here before I get accused of validating the output of something akin to Google Translate. When I say that machine translation can speed up production, I mean that - in a certain number of cases - a correct translation can be arrived at faster by editing machine-translated output than by translating from scratch. I would not wish to imply that an editing stage is not necessary, especially since there's no telling when the system moves from "reasonable output with minor errors" to "so bad it's virtually unintelligible".
ReplyDeleteJust found out your blog. I want so much to laugh at your jokes, but I'm still in the office. Keep up the good work and the translation humour. It made my day!
ReplyDeleteWell, your post made me really laugh and it’s a good work done with translation humor.
ReplyDeleteJust came across this and love it. Anything that can or could be perceive to get lost in translation always makes me smile.
ReplyDeleteI thought I ought to let you know that you are rather awesome :P
ReplyDeleteI loooove the jokes :P
Oh Mox, how timely... I empathise. Last week I had 18.5 hours of it. And the end-client apparently "doesn't care about quality".... obviously. The majority was Google translate.
ReplyDeleteMox, whether you quite translation or not, please don't quit making these funny cartoons!
ReplyDelete