Secondary Translation Quality Indicators

Posted on February 21, 2012 by Iina on Multilizer Translation Blog

From a buyer’s point of view, a very common problem with quality is that it might not be visible or evaluable before the actual purchasing transaction is made. In some cases the quality cannot even be seen afterwards. Unfortunately, it is the lack of quality which becomes visible when least expected, and with high costs.  Translation quality makes no difference. Translation quality is extremely challenging to evaluate. To be able to say whether the translation is good or not, one needs a lot of knowledge on the used languages and the source material. Because it is so hard to see the quality, buyers (and service providers) often search for help from secondary quality indicators.

Even highly skilled professional translators and interpreters have to rely on secondary quality indicators when communicating with potential customers. People who are looking for help with translation are rarely experts in the field. References, recommendations, diplomas, reputation are examples of quality indicators which refer to the actual translation quality only indirectly. Every translation task is individual and the success in previous assignments doesn’t guarantee or determine the quality of the next job. This applies not only to translators; it is a real challenge in most service businesses.

Although the link between secondary indicators and upcoming quality may be weak, well-selected indicators can enable building trust between the participants, and trust is indeed a key element between translation service buyer and provider. It is said that every translator will provide a different translation for the same piece of text, and that there isn’t any single correct or right way to do it. When the absolute correctness is such a complex concept, secondary quality indicators can be very handy, like many translators already know. However, it would be on everyone’s interest if those indirect quality indicators had only the attention they deserve. Misleading use of those trust building elements is not profitable in the long run. Long term business relationships are always built on real translation quality.

Secondary quality indicators are an advantage for professional translators as compared to machine translation. When talking about machine translation quality there is rarely any secondary elements involved. Hence, the debate between human and machine translation quality is not always completely even.

 

Free Version Available: Translate PDF Documents with Multilizer!

Localize Your Software with MultilizerLet machine translators translate your PDF files automatically and use your energy only in proofreading. Try this kind of simple and convenient translating with Multilizer PDF Translator!
Posted in Machine translation | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Trust Is Important in Translation Quality

Posted on February 17, 2012 by Iina on Multilizer Translation Blog

Translation quality is an interesting thing. It can be easy or impossible to evaluate, depending on your own languages skills. When the text is translated to your own native language, poor grammatical quality is fairly easy to see. When the text is translated to a language you don’t have any knowledge of, you cannot say a word about the translation quality. However, to be able to say whether the overall translation quality is good or not you should not only pay attention to the grammar of the translated text but you should also be able to check and understand the original text.

How to evaluate whether the translation is correct if you don't understand a word?This all means that no one can truly evaluate the translation quality unless he or she has very good language skills. This dilemma makes me wonder the role of those people who buy translations. They may never get to know what they have purchased. The only thing they can rely on is the translator’s word, and trust becomes a prerequisite in any transaction between a translation buyer and provider.

Based on this observation, I would argue that the problem with machine translation is not the actual translation quality. Machine translation suffers from lack of reliability. If we don’t have the required knowledge to be able to proofread the automatic translation, there’s a risk involved in using the translation publicly. But if we aren’t able to trust the machine, it doesn’t matter whether the automatic translation is correct or not.

 

Translate PDF Documents Automatically

Localize Your Software with MultilizerTranslate PDF documents automatically and edit the machine translated text easily with MS Word, OpenOffice, Excel, etc. Buy Multtilizer PDF Translator Standard today; also Free version available!
Posted in General Discussion, Machine translation | Tagged , | Leave a comment

To Use Machine Translation or Not to Use – That’s the Question

Posted on January 26, 2012 by Iina on Multilizer Translation Blog

Machine translation is widely available, quick and easy. Machine translators know dozens of languages. Machine translated texts look correct (“although I don’t actually understand the language and thus cannot be sure whether it’s correct”).  At the same time machine translation gets a lot of negative response about its poor quality. Many professional, human translators argue that proofreading a machine translated text takes more time and is more laborious than translating from a scratch. These opposite point of views can be very confusing. So, should I use machine translation or not?

Arguments against machine translation

Machine translators are not and will never become human beings. Languages are human made communication methods with some logic and a lot of irregularity. Machines calculate, people think.

Using machine translation contains risk if one doesn’t have any skills on that specific language.

Machine translation is still rarely totally flawless. The fact is that machine translators make mistakes what comes to the grammatical correctness.

Machine translators are too easy and fast which lowers the threshold to use it. In worst scenario the situation can be similar to sending SMS under influence. Some acumen is always recommended.

Low quality machine translations ruin the overall quality of written languages, and thus it shouldn’t be used.

Arguments for machine translation

People always understand their own language (even with low quality) better than a language they have no knowledge of.

Machine translation quality is improving constantly; today some language pairs produce amazingly good machine translation quality.

In situations when time and money are restrictive assets machine translation is often the most reasonable way to translate.

Machine translation is a tool for understanding the idea or message of foreign language information. It’s not even supposed to be a grammar genius.

Machine translation is cheap or even free, and thus one can easily try whether the text can be translated with machine translator. If the outcome is unreadable, the losses remain very minimal.

Some translators and translation agencies charge less for proofreading of machine translated text than for translating from the beginning.

New innovations in the field of machine translation quality, which both improve and evaluate the quality, will decrease all the uncertainty around machine translation.

What other reasons would you argue either for or against machine translation?

 

Translate PDF Documents Automatically to 27 Languages!

Localize Your Software with MultilizerImproved Multilizer PDF Translator is now available in 11 application languages. Also Free version for short documents. Download now!
Posted in Machine translation | Tagged , | 1 Comment

When Machine Translation Usefulness Is Higher Than Quality

Posted on January 23, 2012 by Multilizer / Niko Papula

Often usefulness of machine translation quality is regarded as the same thing as its usefulness. However, machine translation can be used in many ways. And in different use cases different things matter. Here we represent one case where translation’s usefulness depends only partially on the machine translation quality.

The example is about a newsletter which was machine translated to different languages.  The newsletter recipients were asked to evaluate both the quality of the translation and how useful they think the translation is. (Read the complete case study here.) The graph below shows the results.

Source: http://www.roi-learning.com/dvm/pubs/articles/tatc-24/

These results are quite interesting. The graph shows that although the machine translation quality was evaluated far from perfect, the translations’ usefulness was regarded as higher than its quality. However, this applies only when translation quality is above certain threshold. Bad or poor quality machine translations are naturally deemed as useless.

Although this case study is rather old, it seems that the respondents were rather tolerant towards translation errors. The quality of machine translation is nowadays quite different than it was in the beginning of the 21st century. It’s hard to tell what were the respondents general conceptions about the overall quality of machine translation. It is probable that today the use of free machine translation services has taught people to expect even less from machine translation.

The most important thing here is to realize that the quality (or the lack of it) doesn’t directly determine the usefulness of the machine translation. The quality of machine translation is more than just correct grammar.

 

Localize Your Software with MultilizerTranslate PDF documents automatically with Multilizer. Now also free Multilizer PDF Translator available for translating short PDF documents. Read more and download here!

Posted in Machine translation | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Language Barriers Visualized [graph]

Posted on January 11, 2012 by Multilizer / Niko Papula

Globalization seems to be a phenomenon which is here to stay. For some people globalization is a possibility and for others it is a threat. The latter group says that globalization is going to kill local cultures, habits and languages. These people can now be less concerned about the issue, because language barriers still exist.

In the graph below you can see the language barriers in action. It shows how much or little separated each language is linked from each other. The graph tells for example how many of the sites in German language link to sites in French (0.01). We can draw interesting conclusions from the graph.

Click to enlarge. Source: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2011/07/languages-of-world-wide-web.html

We can assume that when a person visits an interesting site he or she shares the link with others in social media sites or in a blog posting or in other location. This means that if for example many French people visit German sites often there should be many links from French sites to German sites and vice versa. Likewise, if French people don’t visit German sites often there is only small number of links.

Like the graph illustrates, there are surprisingly little connections between languages. Even when people do understand other languages, they usually visit sites in their own language. For example, French people commonly study Spanish at schools. However, they don’t commonly visit Spanish web sites. And although Germans often study French, they don’t usually visit French sites. And the same applies to almost any other language.

There are couple of possible reasons for the lack of links between different languages. First, the content might already be translated to many languages, and people can choose in which language they read the content. People tend to choose the language they understand best. Secondly, people might find foreign language content uninteresting. This scenario is only theoretical because we cannot assume that the attractiveness of the content is related to the used language. Thirdly, people might not fully understand the content if it is written with other than their native language. If they don’t understand, they may not want to link to the content.

All this confirms the common opinion that you have to communicate in people’s own language to reach them. In the future, machine translation quality will surely improve and lower the language barrier.

 

Localize Your Software with MultilizerLocalize your documents and software with Multilizer Localization Tools. Read more and download free trials at www.multilizer.com.

Posted in General Discussion, Languages | Tagged | 1 Comment