In What Does The Future Hold For Translators? , it talks
about what the future looks like to translators. During a 2015 Institute of
Translation and Interpreting Conference, Tech Comm expert Stefan Gentz,
addressed the outlook for translators. Many points were made by him including:
~Clients want faster translations, and do not want to wait.
~Cheaper and affordable translations are wanted, and some
need thousands of word translated and simply don’t have the money to afford
this.
~Technology is moving at a fast, we need to embrace this to
help fulfill the needs of meeting clients expectations.
~Without translation, there is no global business.
All in all, I believe Stefan made some good points and maybe
we need to embrace the technology we have to help with translating. Think about
it, we would be able to better meet the expectation clients, it’s faster and
cheaper. Overall, its way more affordable than a human translator, who can only
translate so fast. Why not have a machine translators, get twice the work done
in a matter of minutes.
It does sound promising right? However, personally, I’m not
for machine translating. I’ll tell you my reasons.
~Job loss
~ Unnatural translations, robotic translations
~ wrong translations. (I’ll explain more on this in a
moment.)
I believe if we were to have machine translators, there
would already be a big decrease in the translating industry. There already if
with Google and Microsoft. Nowadays, we want to create jobs, not take them
away, not take away a career and replace it with machines. My second reason,
unnatural and robotic translations. Translators take many elements into account
such as:
~ tone of the text
~cultural or contextual references,
~slang
~specific expressions
~familiar language
On the other hand, a machine
wouldn’t take these elements into account when translating. If these elements aren’t
meet when translating there could be many misinterpretations. Lastly, wrong
translations, when using an automatic translator, it can sometimes translate
what you want into the literal translation and translate word-for-word. In my experience,
when I use google translate I know if I try to translate a sentence, in this
case English to Japanese, I KNOW the translation isn’t always right. Most of
the time, its incorrect. The translation comes out robotic and unnatural. The
only thing I trust google translate to do it translate single words. Even there
you have to be careful. Here is examples of google translate for you:
Let’s try the phrase お疲れ様でした（おつかれさまでした）
(otsukaresamadeshita). In Japanese, you would say this phrase to someone when
you are acknowledging they have done something tiring, and appreciate their hard
work.
Japanese →English
お疲れ様でした（おつかれさまでした）→ Was cheers for good work
Overall, if machines were to replace human translators, I believe
there would be misinterpretations trying to translate different languages.
However, I do think Stefan made good point in his discussion. In the end I hope
that somehow, the translating industry does not go away, and somehow we will be
able to figure out a happy medium between machine and human translating.
