Future
of Machine Translation
I do not see machine translation ever fully taking over
human translation. This class has introduced me to many different types of
translation software and every time we learned about a new one, the more I
didn’t like the idea of mixing technology into my translations. It seemed to
complicate things for me personally. I know that this is not the case for
everyone and perhaps more than anything I didn’t enjoy using the technologies
because I am not very technology savy in the first place. It just seems easier
for me to translate it on my own, the old school way, using a dictionary and my
own personal knowledge.
For my big project I was able to investigate into the
machine translation software that the Latter-day Saint Church uses. I was very
surprised to hear from the director of Spanish Translation, Enrique Resek, that
machine translation is rarely used, and when it is used, it is only used for
small things like news. The thing that surprised me most was how positive he
was about machine translation being used in the future. It seemed to be something
that he sees as a very plausible possibility and really talked it up, and yet I
didn’t see that much was being done to move it forward. It seems that I hear
often that machine translation will be the main translation tool in five years.
Resek said the same, and yet that was also said by Dr. Lytle back in 1974.
Granted, I understand that machine translation has definitely progressed since
then, but it just seems like it should have progressed more than it has thus
far.
In my opinion, there are things that a machine will never
be able to translate. People spend years living in different countries and
studying different cultures and still struggle to know all of the slang/jargon
that is used. How is a computer to learn these things that can never be translated
as synonyms? It can’t. It is impossible for us to feed a computer everything
that it needs. However, if a human comes across something that they are unsure
how to translate, they have many different resources that they can use to find
a good translation for said problem. A machine might just stick to translating
word for word which can cause many problems.
On top of that, language is always changing. We can’t
even keep up with it on our own. New generations bring new ways to use existing
vocabulary and create new vocabulary all together. Old vocabulary is changed
and used in new ways that most native speakers might struggle to understand.
Just as the world of language is constantly changing, the machines would have
to change along with it and how will they change, they will need human help.
What I see in the future of machine translation is that there will always have
to be a human right there revising and changing the things that didn’t turn out
the way they should. It would be easier for the human to do the initial
translation than have to babysit and check and double check everything that the
machine does.
It also appears that there are many expenses and issues
(such as licensing) that go into machine translation. Anything technology these days is not fully
reliable and can stop working or be lost in seconds.
I think it is safer to stick to the old way of
translation and keep humans involved to the maximum. There is no substitute for
the things that a human knows when it comes to cultures/language. We need to
keep it that way and not try to change what is already working so well.
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