If you see a phrase in a foreign language and you don’t know what it means the first thing most of us do is go to Google and find a few language translation sites. These sites allow you to type in a single word, phrase, or an entire book and it quickly translates it from one selected language to another. English is easily translated to Chinese and Chinese to English translations are easy as well.
Many people choose to use a computer program or website to translate documents, articles, or even other websites; this is sometimes referred to as machine translation. Computers are used for translation for a number of reasons: if the translation is needed quickly it is much timelier to use a computer rather than a person, computer translations are less expensive than human translations, the material being translated is too technical or boring for a human translator, a great deal of consistency is required in the translation, a high quality translation is not necessary. These are all examples of when a computer translation is a better choice when compared to a human translator.
The problem with computer or web based translators is the way that they do translations. They translate literally, doing a word for word translation. The problem with this is that they don’t take into account the context, form, technique, and intention of the original text. A machine translator will have all the words translated correctly but the grammar and context will typically not be translated correctly. The context is obviously important as it helps us to understand what the words strung together in sentences mean.
For some texts needing to be translated this machine based translation will be fine as the material is translated well enough to provide a gist translation, providing the reader with the gist of the material, with complete accuracy not being important.
All is not lost however, with machine translation. It is best used with human intervention. The intervention takes place in pre-editing and post-editing of the translated documents. The machine can do the bulk of the translation while the human can make grammatical and contextual changes.
The use of machine translation in combination with human translators will help break down language barriers and create an even bigger global marketplace.
