What has always been one of the greatest fantasies of science fiction - the possibility of communicating automatically in any language, with an instant and perfect translation carried out by special devices - may not have been fully achieved, but the performance of the best translation software available nowadays can really surprise. But are we so sure that the existence of even the most advanced translation software can supplant a figure such as the professional translator and make it irrelevant?
The era when having texts translated into a single foreign language - English, in most cases - was enough to ensure an international presence and communication of the highest possible level is not far at all. But nonetheless, that era has definitely passed: now the commercial interlocutors of a company all over the world expect materials translated into their own language, and this attitude is particularly strong in those Countries where the market offers the most interesting potential developments.
However, it is evident that translating into multiple languages incurs higher costs and longer waiting times: and this combination of needs and limitations has created such fertile ground for automated text translation.
We’ve said it earlier: the automatic translation which science fiction novels described, carried out by a small headset capable of translating directly into the listener's ear every word being pronounced in any other language, is still utopistic. But that doesn't mean that software for automated text translation hasn't literally made great strides over the past few years. If it was once only possible to program a system to translate word for word, thus creating little more than a very advanced dictionary, evolution has led to translation software that is able to interpret groups of words and even entire sentences, and translate them correctly – both from a grammatical and lexical point of view - in most cases. Whole simple texts can be entered into the system and come out fully translated a few seconds later.
If what we have painted really looks like a reverent analysis of translation software - and we must admit that it would be unfair to ignore its evident evolutions - it does not mean that it does not have considerable limits, substantial ones as far as professional translation is concerned.
Not even the best translation software is today able to understand - and therefore to take into account - the context in which a message is placed, the specific topic to which it refers, the communicative style of a person or an entire culture, and the complexity of the nuances that the choice of a word or idiom reflects. Small things? Quite the contrary: in reality these elements are the ones that really make a difference between a generic text and a text that really performs its function, whether that is to inform, persuade, or even just to communicate.
It is at this point that it becomes evident that the massive work that software can carry out - returning even enormous quantities of text to a target language in literally a few moments - needs to be completed with the action of a professional translator who transforms merely translated text into text that works in the desired language. Professionally, this intervention is defined as post-editing, and literally consists in entrusting the text translated from the machine to a translator who fixes it, gives it a tone, and edits it where the software has ignored nuances that are essential to the desired communication.
While post-editing undoubtedly represents the best known - and necessary – intervention among those for which a professional translator remains an essential figure even for those who make heavy use of automatic translation software, it is not the only precious task that they can perform: in fact, even before the text is entered into the translation system, it is possible to subject it to pre-writing.
Pre-writing consists in the preliminary adaptation of the text by a specialist translator who is aware of the limitations still intrinsic to translation software: in this phase the text will be rewritten and modified to eliminate those expressions and those lexical and stylistic choices that are incomprehensible to the system and would inevitably lead to an incorrect translation. The text can thus be interpreted without errors by the software, and eventually brought back to a good communicative level by post-editing action, as we said.
Contact us today for information on our pre-writing and post-editing services for machine translations: just click herePhoto by geralt on Pixabay
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