The Importance of Process

I wanted to continue my previous entry on the uses of machine translation. I spoke with Walter Hartmann, who has a long experience on MT. According to Walter, the idea of so-called “post-editable MT”, where the first translation is produced by machine and then edited by a human translator, faded quite much around 2001. This method is still used, as indicated by the continuous use of e.g. Personal Translator, PROMT, Systran, Tradissimo etc.

What seems to be increasing is the growing integration of TM and MT. In this approach, the texts to be translated are first run against TMs or translation memories for full or almost full matches, and then the rest is translated by MT, using a special dictionary which contains the special terms in the text. Even some of PC-based programs are integrating TM to a certain extent, and can be used with translation memories from TM.

This integrated approach definitely brings efficiencies and improves consistency through automation. Naturally, the better the original text, the better the translation – but that is actually true also for human translation, which does not eliminate the GIGO principle (garbage in, garbage out). Especially if you are palnning to have a text translated into multiple languages, it is a very good idea to pre-edit the text before sending it to translation.

It all brings us back to the importance of PROCESS, something Leonor has spoken so many times about, and which I absolutely agree on. Translation is not a separate task, it is part of the content management process. Managing multilingual content requires a well-designed process, otherwise you will end up in a costly chaos, from which even the best translators cannot save you!

PS. According to Walter, although it has been a while since the last update, the 12th edition of the Compendium of Translation Software http://www.eamt.org/compendium.html still has the most complete listing of MT programs available.