The Benefits of Automatic Translation Services

Posted on April 16, 2012 by Claudia Amendola - Italian Virtual Assistant

The global demand for accessible, high quality translation services has risen dramatically over the past decade or so. Whether you are expanding your business internationally, or connecting with new friends on the other side of the world, there’s no doubt that a reliable translation service makes the process much easier.

One of the most widely available services of this kind comes in the form of automatic translation. This type of service is available from many popular companies such as Google and Babelfish. There are also some browsers which now provide users with plug-in options, which allow for language detection and translation services for every website visited though them. Even social media sites such as Facebook are offering people an automatic translation of comments made in a foreign language.

These services are free, but of course one has to wonder about the translation quality; does the service provide enough accuracy for the translation to be of use? The answer to this question is not a simple, ‘yes’ or ‘no’. For those who simply want a basic translation of a short article, these automatic translation sites can be incredibly useful. They provide instant access to material which would otherwise be unavailable to a person who does not speak the language. Provided the person reading the text is just looking for a general introduction to the topic, then machine translation services are perfect.  However, for those who require exceptionally accurate translation for the purposes of business or study, then the current automatic services may not be suitable.

It’s important to bear in mind that the technology used to in machine translation is constantly under development and updates are regularly made to sites such as Google Translate in order to ensure they provide as accurate a translation as possible.

One of the most positive aspects of machine translation is that is allows for the sharing of knowledge without the costs of hiring a professional translator. Those who cannot afford to pay for a person to translate an important document can now access that content free of charge, or for a very small fee, depending on what service they use.

Automatic translation services are also ideal for those who want their emails and documents translated without confidentiality concerns. For instance, if a business owner wishes to have a financial document translated, hiring a person to provide this service could create certain privacy breaches, depending on the nature of the information in the document. This isn’t an issue when one uses an automatic translation service.

Anyone who is running a company with international operations will know the importance of communication in creating a successful business. The same policies and professional goals of the company must be understood by all of the employees worldwide, regardless of the language barriers. For those whose business extends to multiple countries, automatic translations services can be invaluable, as they allow for the immediate translation of a document into any number of languages. Most human translators rarely speak more than four languages, and so may not be as useful to business owners who require instant translation of texts into several languages.

 

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Best Practices for Better Machine Translation Quality

Posted on March 27, 2012 by Iina on Multilizer Translation Blog

Machine translation is a great tool in right situations. Still many seems to be concerned about the translation quality. Although the automatic translation can be improved by writing machine translation friendly text, there are also a few simple and quick ways to make the translation better without rewriting the whole text.

1) Correct spelling mistakes

Spelling mistakes are common and they have a great impact on the machine translation quality. Always use spell check if you have one.

2) Add missing spaces

A space between characters tells the machine translator when one word ends and another begins. Without spaces the whole text is one, very long word form the machine’s perspective.

3) Overuse commas

Most language have rules how to use commas. Although they are important and useful in most cases it seems that with machine translation the more commas there are between different thoughts and parts of sentences the better the result. A comma separates the words and help machine translators to combine the right verbs and nouns; to find the right subject to the predicate.

4) Cut long sentences into pieces

Like commas, also other punctuation marks are a great way to structure the text to be more translatable. This advice not only ease the translation but also makes the original text easier to read. For some reason we tend to write too complex sentences although shorter phrases are easier to adopt. So, this advice actually applies to all writing with or without translation plans.

5) Check the keywords if you can

If you have some knowledge on the target language, you can improve the translation quality by checking the most crucial words. If those are translated correctly, then the reader will understand the content and idea. And the understanding should be more important than the right grammar when using machine translation.

 

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Why People Choose Machine Translation Over Professional Translation?

Posted on March 16, 2012 by Iina on Multilizer Translation Blog

Should I choose machine translator?Machine translation has some superior advantages which appeal to people. The more people translate with machine translators the better the automatic translation gets. This can be scary to those professional translators who are afraid over their businesses. As a backlash, professional translators have gotten into the auto-repeated mantra about the poor translation quality. The most stringent opposition argues that the quality of automatic translation is so poor that no one should ever use it for anything.

The quality or lack of it is not a secret. We use machine translation for other reasons that outdo the shortage in quality. Here are three most common arguments for using machine translation:

Machine translation is easy
The best thing about machine translation is that it is simple to use. In its easiest form, one just puts the original text in and the machine gives the translation. Professional translation is not available as easily. First of all, finding the right person to do the translation requires some effort. Then one should negotiate about the prices and schedule and other relevant things. For someone who has never bought a translation before this task may feel overwhelming. It’s in the human nature to avoid stepping out of the comfort zone. When machine translation is just few clicks away, it becomes easily the most tempting option.

Machine translation is fast
Everything in our world seems to move faster and faster all the time. Today, we have information more than we can ever adopt as well as more efficient communication tools. We are used to get everything quickly. There are situation when “now and here” beats “later and better”. If a customer sends you a message by email or through social media and you don’t understand his language, there is no time to send it to a professional translator. Even the biggest language service providers cannot be faster than a machine. Communication between humans takes always time, and it would cost A LOT to have a translator ready for unexpected situations all the time.

Machine translation is cheap
Yes, it’s true that money is also one reason, but I think its weight is often overemphasized. More often machine translation offers the price-quality ratio. It is good that professional translators are proud of their profession and want to produce the best translation quality. However, the best quality is not always needed. Sometimes good enough translation quality is the goal or even mediocre quality can be enough to be able to understand the message. It’s just not wise to pay for a higher quality than you need, right?

 

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Translation Quality Is Not the Issue with Machine Translators

Posted on March 8, 2012 by Iina on Multilizer Translation Blog

It can be difficult to trust that machine translation is correct.Although machine translation quality is improving all the time, the public opinion still seems to be that any translation produced by a machine will score low in the quality scale. While quality is important in translation, it is also very difficult to evaluate. Together these to properties make it easy to speak about quality problems when the real reasons behind negative attitudes are difficult to define.

Machine translation has come a long way during its relatively short history. Today it is possible to produce fairly good quality with a machine translator. The actual problem is not the quality anymore; it’s the lack of trust that causes opposition. Trust is a basic human feeling, and feelings are too subjective, impulsive and changeable for a plausible argument. Rationality is a good thing in our world and rational people want to justify their opinions with concrete things, like quality issues.

Or which one of these arguments is more credible to you?

“I tried machine translation once and didn’t like it. Never, ever translate anything with a machine!”

“I tried machine translation once and the output was awful. Never, ever translate anything with a machine!”

There’s always some risk involved with service business. With translations the risk is mostly related to the responsibility. Because the buyer cannot truly check the quality of the translation, there should be someone to blame if any problems occurs later with the translation. Professional human translators can answer for their actions while machine translators cannot be held responsible for your choice to use automatic translation publicly. When using machine translation one can blame only oneself for any possible mistakes. For some people the responsibility is too big to handle and they choose to hire a human being for the job to ease their own burden.

And all this has nothing to do with the actual quality of a machine translation. The quality of an automatic translation may or may not be good but the uncertainty is there anyway. The usability of machine translation will be remarkably better if (or when) the uncertainty and reliability issues have been solved.

What kind of innovation would make you trust the machine translation more?

 

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Perceived Translation Quality Tells Only Little about the Actual Translation Quality

Posted on February 29, 2012 by Iina on Multilizer Translation Blog

The grammatical correctness of a translation is undoubtedly important per se but its role in the buying, decision making and evaluating process is minor. The customer cares only about the perceived translation quality which is – at least partly – created in the buyer’s mind already before the actual transaction. Any buying process is more complex than we might think, and situations without any prior knowledge or attitudes are rare. Objectivity is not easy to achieve when you have to be an active subject.

Translator’s reputation is one important factor which tunes our opinions from the very beginning. In a buyer’s mind, the translator’s reputation can both build a trustworthy image and act as a guarantee or an insurance against flawed translation. Human mind tends to build causal relationships between different things. We think that a reputable translator is able to produce high-quality translations constantly because otherwise the reputation would be damaged. This kind of circular reasoning tells very little about the actual translation quality but it creates positive energy over the translator.

Professional translators can always build good reputations with their actions, but the situation is different with machine translators; they cannot speak for themselves. I would even argue that although a machine and a human being produce translations which reach the same quality level, we will probably think that the one made my human is better. A professional translator can utilize several kinds of secondary quality indicators which a machine translator cannot have.

The contradiction between the translator’s and client’s points of views leads to an absurd situation. When reading online discussions, it is clear that many translators are extremely concentrated on the grammatical issues. These translators are often very shocked when someone uses machine translation. However, the good enough translation quality combined with quick and easy access can result in perceived quality which is satisfactory enough. People know that machine translation is seldom flawless, but in certain cases it’s the best choice for them.

When machine translation is good enough for you?

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