Entry #3

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.