Translator Software Makes It A Small World After All

I was at a party about twenty years ago when the topic of document translation came up

. Someone said something like, "Well, it's not a very useful skill, because computers are going to be able to do all of that before too long anyway." My brother and I gave each other the silent "this person is a total idiot" look. He had a degree in Russian, and I was working on a degree in Japanese, and both of us knew from experience that computer-based translation was probably not something we were going to see in our lifetimes.

Don't get me wrong; we both knew that translation software was being developed, but having seen those efforts first-hand, we knew that it would be a very long time before automated translators were able to replace humans. Artificial intelligence is just that, artificial, and no matter how big you make the chips, computers still can't reliably figure out what people mean.

What we also knew and were both very excited about was that software developers understood the limitations of automated translation and were creating some incredible tools to put into the hands of translators. What was being developed was a virtual industrial revolution that would not replace the need for human translators, but that would make them exponentially efficient and enable them to translate documents faster with a higher degree of accuracy.

In traditional translation, a translator would sit with an original document, several dictionaries, and either a notepad or a word processor. The translator would then work sentence upon sentence, slowly moving the original document into the target language. Once that process was complete, the document was usually reviewed by a second and third party before being presented as a final copy.

The computerized process is far more simple: A source document is scanned or entered into a computer program. The computer then creates a rough draft translation that is reviewed by a human translator. The rough draft is largely unintelligible to someone who doesn't understand both the source and the target language. It is usually littered with multiple and alternate meanings for words, jumbled grammar, and improper punctuation. The translator then reorganizes the target document, choosing the correct words and reworking the grammar. The software can then be instructed to identify repetitive sentences and phrases and apply the same translation to each one, saving a translator several hours of work. While the savings in time and effort may not be evident, I can say that from personal experience that using this type of tool can make a translator about three-times more productive.

We live in an exciting time where our world really has become a small one. The use of translator software has not only reduced the size, but increased the speed by which we may communicate.

by: Art Gib

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