Human Translation Vs. Machine Translation

Human Translation Vs. Machine Translation – Who Wins, and Why?

The debate of man versus machine has been raging on for years, and it doesn’t seem to go away anytime soon! From film productions such as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator to real-world scenarios, the concern due to Artificial Intelligence (AI) is growing. Will humans be expendable in the near future? Although the threat is in nearly all industries, the translation industry appears to attract increased attention due to its importance in culture. As technology continues to advance, do human translators stand a chance against machine translators? Who wins in the debate of machine translators versus human translators? Read on for an in-depth analysis of the pro and cons of each side of the debate, and a fact-based verdict on who wins.

The Battleground – Trends in the Translation Industry

The career outlook for translation and interpretation professionals is a dilemma. On the one hand, it’s one of the fastest-growing industries. According to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the rapidly-growing profession is expected to increase by 46% between 2015 and 2022. Similarly, a research project by CarrerBuilder ranked Translation and Interpretation (T&I) as one of the most promising industries in regard to new jobs created. In particular, the study estimated that there would be nearly 13,000 new T&I jobs between 2014-2019.

Figure 1. The Growth of Machine Translation (Source: Statista)

On the other hand, tremendous technological advancements in machine translation threaten the career outlook of Translation and Interpretation professionals. According to an informative article appearing in The Economist, the quality of translation technology is constantly rising, putting the future of human translators into question. Do we embrace technology at the cost of human translation? Or is there a middle ground whereby supporters of both sides of the debate can find a truce?

Expert Tip: One of the most important things in any translation and interpretation task is the risk or consequences of potential mistakes. For example, translation mistakes in legal documents, medical equipment, political statements, or manuals can have life-threatening repercussions. 

Machine Translation

Since scientists and developers started developing machine translation in the 1950s, the technology has undergone decades of improvements. Today machine translation tools such as Yandex Translate, Bing Translator, and the wildly popular Google Translate offer state-of-the-art translation services at the click of a button. 

Figure 2. Comparison of the quality of translation (Source: Google AI Blog)

In 2016, Google announced the revolutionary Google Neural Machine Translation System, which is touted to be nearly as good as human translators (see figure 2 above). This was a testament to the tremendous growth of machine translation. But is it good enough to replace human translation? Below are the pros and cons of machine translation.

Disadvantages of Machine Translation:

• Machines cannot translate context, especially when words have dual meanings
• Machine translation does not relate words to culture-specific slangs, puns, idioms, and other lexical items 
• The accuracy of machine translation is inconsistent between languages
• Machines cannot recreate a style of tone from one language to another
• Translation mistakes can be costly
• Depending on the content and context, machine translation has lower levels of accuracy

Advantages of Machine Translation:

• Machine translation is constantly improving
• Machine translation is the cheaper option – tools such as Google translate are free
• Translation tools such as Skype Translator or Google Translate are readily available
• Machine translation is fast and instantaneous 
• Unlike human translation, machine translation allows users to use one tool for multiple languages

Human Translation

During the 2019 Croatian Language Community Conference, Professor Andy Way delivered an informative talk, in which he weighed in his opinion of the ‘machine versus human translation’ debate. In particular, he claimed that “despite technological advances, the challenge of overcoming the language barrier remains.  We will always need human expert translators to verify the output of machine translation engines.  We will not be replaced!” Below are some advantages and disadvantages of human translation that highlight the reasoning behind Professor Andy Way’s argument:

Advantages of Human Translation

• Human translation can capture the meaning and context of words
• Human translation offers the highest level of accuracy
• Professional translators can understand and interpret localized languages, including the creative use of words (slogans, metaphors, puns, etc.)
• If the literal translation of content is not available, human translators can determine the best alternatives to convey the meaning
• The ability to review work ensures the quality of the human translation process

Disadvantages of Human Translation

• The scope of human translators is limited. You’ll need different translators for different languages
• Professional translation is costly, whereas most machine translation tools are free or affordable
• Human translation has a longer turnaround time

The Unbiased Verdict

Based on the industry trends and arguments for both sides, the ‘machine versus human translation’ debate is unnecessary. There is a time and a place for both machine translation and human translation. As shown in the graph below, the solution lies in collaboration. The future of translation is about machines and humans working together to boost efficiency and accuracy. In an article published in The Korea Times, Shin Seok-Hwan, the Vice President of Saltlux Inc (a language service provider) asserted that "Though research shows machine translators can perform about 85 to 90 percent of human experts, they still make absurd mistakes. Today's event is more about how much humans can benefit from using these machines and boost work efficiency of professional translators."

Figure 3. Collaboration of humans and machines for improved performance (Source: HBR.org)

In a nutshell, machine translation should necessarily be seen as a threat to human translators. Both sides of the debate have their advantages and disadvantages. The important thing is to know when it’s better to use the services of machine translation rather than human translation, and vice versa? But for the best results, the key lies in collaboration between man and machine.

___________________________________________________________

Rodrigo Ortiz-Monasterio - the author - is a professional Spanish Translator and Spanish Copywriter with over 25 years of experience in the marketing, advertising, business and corporate communications fields.

History of Translation: From Ancient Times to Modern Age

Did you know that translation is arguably one of the most significant catalysts in shaping national identities, developing languages, bridging cultural diversities, and understanding how ancient civilizations interacted? The word translation means “bringing/carrying across” – from the Latin word, translatio. Therefore, translation is the practice of bringing a text from a source language to another. Unlike interpretation, which involves oral conversion, translation deals with written text.

Translation has been helping different societies grow and move forward for thousands of years. But do you know about the history of translation? Where it began, where we are, and where it's headed? Or better yet, why is it necessary to learn about the history of translation in the first place? To answer the latter, learning the development and role of translation has allowed scholars and linguistics to discern ancient civilizations by comprehending the contextual meaning of ancient scripts.

Below is a summary of the historical path of translation from ancient times to modern machine translation, freelance translation services, and language service providers. It’s a quite captivating journey, spanning different mediums, cultures, and civilizations.

Translation in Ancient History

According to St. Jerome (patron saint of translation), a good translator should translate a written text “sense for sense” rather than “word for word.” If you don’t already know St. Jerome, he was a historian, theologian, and priest who was most notably known for his translation of the Bible into Latin during the 4^th Century. In fact, his work was the preferred Bible text for the Roman Catholic Church for quite a while. As ancient as the 4^th Century sounds, translation actually dates back to as far as the 2^nd Century when Terence (Roman playwright) translated comedies from Greek to Roman – it was the first concept of a translator.

Concept aside, it is believed that the first translated text on record was the Bible (Hebrew to Greek) during the 3^rd century. At the time of this historical translation, the Jews were not conversant with Hebrew, their inherited language. As a means to make their Holy book mainstream, they translated the Old Testament into the prevailing dominant language, Greek. The translation was known as Septuagint, based on the 70 translators who worked on the project. The Bible was later translated into Latin, Coptic, and Georgian among other languages. Interestingly, the Bible is still being translated today into hundreds of languages all over the world – making it one of the longest-running translation projects in history.

At around 2500 BC, translation services were relatively common in ancient societies in the Middle East. Translators used clay/stone tablets to decrypt ancient Semitic languages such a Sumerian and Eblaite. How do we know about such a prehistoric practice? Believe it or not, we owe such a discovery to Napoleon’s French army. In 1799, the conquering French army found a stone slab (Rosetta Stone) with Hieroglyphic engravings of prehistoric Semitic languages. The finding helped scholars to understand Egyptian hieroglyphics and to gauge the contribution of ancient translators. It should be noted that although various scholars worked on the Rosetta Stone through the ages, Jean-Francois Champollion stands out for his indispensable contribution.

Translation in Medieval History

What do we know about language during the Medieval period? It was a time when Latin was rapidly spreading throughout the Western world. Latin was translated into dialect languages such as ancient English to facilitate seamless interaction. Below are some of the important developments during the Medieval period that left an imprint on the history of translation:

• 9^th Century: The translation of the Ecclesiastical History and The Consolation of Philosophy by Bede and Boethius respectively helped improve the English prose in the Western world.
• 12^th Century: Scholars from Europe meet at the Toledo School of Translators in Spain to translate philosophical, medical, scientific, and religious texts into Latin and Castilian.
• 13^th Century: Roger Bacon gauged that a translator should have systematic information on the source and target language for the best translation outcome.
• 14^th Century: Geoffrey Chaucer (father of English literature) translated Roman De La Rose (French), and works of Boethius (Latin) and Giovanni Boccaccio (Italian) into the lesser popular English language. Additionally, John Wycliffe directed a series of translation of the Bible from Latin to English.
• Into the Renaissance Period: Translations of Greek and Arab into Latin by Arab Translators kept Greek scientific and philosophical work alive.

Translation in Modern History

• The 1950s: Translation work escalated and the manual adaptation of literature became labor-intensive. Engineers researched into ways of automating translation. The efforts bore fruit in 1954 when the Georgetown-IBM experiment helped translate around 60 sentences of Russian text to English in a minute.
• The 1980s: The development and rise of computational power during the period facilitated increased interest in machine translation.
• The 1990s: The machine translation industry thrived due to the introduction of globalization, propagation of the Internet, advanced speech recognition technology, and inexpensive computers.
• 1996 and 1997: Systran and AltaVista Babelfish offered free translation.
• 2012: Google translate was introduced as a game-changer that led to unprecedented growth in the translation industry.

Please note that although machine translations are efficient and cost-effective, they cannot quite replace human translators – machines simply augment the work of human translators.

The Present and Future of Translation

Today, translators have a truckload of tools at their disposal. Translators from different regions of the globe are aided by powerful computers, allowing for more accurate and highly specialized translations. But similar to 19 Centuries ago, translation services still play a significant role in the increasingly interconnected society. It is not surprising that the translation industry was roughly worth $37billion in 2015 – and it has been growing ever since (see figure below).

For the past several thousand years, translators have been playing a crucial role in culture and advancing civilizations. As technology continues to improve and interconnectedness increases, we expect translation to help move our society forward. The industry is expected to continue growing courtesy of the increased demand for non-English translation, the advancement of computer-aided productivity tools, and the growth of globalization.
 

___________________________________________________________

Rodrigo Ortiz-Monasterio - the author - is a professional Spanish Translator and Spanish Copywriter with over 25 years of experience in the marketing, advertising, business and corporate communications fields.

Translation quotes that deserve to be quoted:

“It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.”

Walter Benjamin (German philosopher)

"Translators are the shadow heroes of literature, the often-forgotten instruments that make it possible for different cultures to talk to one another, who have enabled us to understand that we all, from every part of the world, live in one world.”

Paul Auster (American writer and director)

"Translation is like a woman. If it is beautiful, it is not faithful. If it is faithful, it is most certainly not beautiful."

Yevgeny Yevtushenko (Russian poet)

"To translate, one must have a style of his own, for the translation will have no rhythm or nuance, which come from the process of artistically thinking through and molding the sentences; they cannot be reconstituted by piecemeal imitation. The problem of translation is to retreat to a simpler tenor of one’s own style and creatively adjust this to one’s author."

Paul Goodman (American social critic and anarchist philosopher)

“Translation is that which transforms everything so that nothing changes.”

Günter Grass (Nobel Prize German novelist and poet)

“Human writing reflects that of the universe; it is its translation, but also its metaphor: it says something totally different, and it says the same thing.”

Octavio Paz (Nobel Prize Mexican Poet and diplomat)

“Without translation, I would be limited to the borders of my own country. The translator is my most important ally. He introduces me to the world.”

Italo Calvino (Italian novelist, journalist and short-story writer)

"The original is unfaithful to the translation."

Jorge Luis Borges (Argentine poet, essayist, and short-story writer)

“Each language has its own take on the world. That's why a translation can never be absolutely exact and, therefore, when you enter another language and speak with its speakers, you become a slightly different person; you learn a different sort of world.”

Kate Grenville (Australian author)

“A translation is no translation, he said, unless it will give you the music of a poem along with the words of it.”

John Millington Synge (Irish poet)

“A translation needs to read convincingly. There's no limit to what can go into it in terms of background research, feeling, or your own interests in form and history. But what should come out is something that reads as convincing English-language text.”

Jonathan Galassi (American publisher, poet and translator)

“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is really a large matter — it’s the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”

Mark Twain (American writer, humorist and lecturer)

“Translators have to prove to themselves as to others that they are in control of what they do; that they do not just translate well because they have a “flair” for translation, but rather because, like other professionals, they have made a conscious effort to understand various aspects of their work.”

Mona Baker (Egyptian Professor of translation studies)

“The first rule of translation: make sure you know at least one of the bloody languages!”

Faiz Ahmad Faiz (Pakistani poet and author)

“So many people consider their work a daily punishment. Whereas I love my work as a translator. Translation is a journey over a sea from one shore to the other. Sometimes I think of myself as a smuggler: I cross the frontier of language with my booty of words, ideas, images, and metaphors.”

Amara Lakhous (Algerian author, journalist and anthropologist)

“Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.”

Anthony Burgess (English writer and composer)

___________________________________________________________

Rodrigo Ortiz-Monasterio - the compiler - is a professional Spanish Translator and Spanish Copywriter with over 25 years of experience in the marketing, advertising, business and corporate communications fields.

Tap Into the Hispanic Market - Grow Your Sales With the Help of a Professional Spanish Translator!

Did you know that Latinos represent the largest and fastest growing minority in the U.S., amounting to 58 million people and accounting for over 18% of the U.S. population? Is your company aware that the Hispanic market in the U.S. has a purchasing power of 1.7 trillion dollars?

In the rapidly expanding U.S. Hispanic and Latin American markets, communicating effectively in neutral Spanish becomes a key asset for any company looking to position its brand, introduce a product or service and gain a reputation.

The Hispanic market embraces more than 45 million potential buyers, so it is no surprise that so many businesses are looking to reach this audience and corner their share of the market. To put things in perspective, we are talking here about the fifth largest Spanish-speaking community in the world, after Mexico, Colombia, Spain and Argentina.

In order to target this appealing minority, your company must first understand their culture, preferences and habits. Once you have a good insight, it is time to speak their language. For the first, you must hire a marketing research agency that will furnish you hard facts, which will allow your company to identify potential opportunities, select target markets, implement marketing programs and, particularly, to define the approach and strategy. For the latter, you require the assistance of a seasoned Spanish Translator, preferably with marketing experience, to translate or "transcreate" your texts and materials. "Transcreation" is the creative, technical and/or cultural adaptation of a translation so it reads like an original on its own and conveys exactly the intended message.

If you want to go further and take your marketing efforts and campaigns to the next level, you may consider relying on a Spanish Copywriter to write your messages from scratch in a creative and persuasive fashion. A copywriter will pay full attention to your needs and goals, study your product, service and organization, relate the whole to its corresponding target, and build the most adequate message possible to meet your objective. As a result, this approach will make your advertising dollars count and ensure that your copy is attractive to your target audience while remaining faithful to your original idea and meaning... keeping you in control from beginning to end!

Hiring a professional Spanish translator or a Spanish copywriter, whether for in-house or outsourced work, it's not an expense but a wise investment. Avoid, by all means, making a selection based exclusively on rates. Focus on quality and experience and always ask for samples and references. Otherwise, you will harm your corporate image and ultimately have to redo what was unacceptable in the first place.

The bottom line: If you need to say it in Spanish, do it right and hire a professional Spanish Translator or Spanish Copywriter. Your brand, product sales and customers will be thankful!

___________________________________________________________

Rodrigo Ortiz-Monasterio - the author - is a professional Spanish Translator and Spanish Copywriter with over 25 years of experience in the marketing, advertising, business and corporate communications fields.