Why Professional Translators? Why not machine translators?
Why Professional Translators? Why not machine translators
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We are living in an era of pure information and technology. We have become technologically so advanced that now anything looks possible if not probable. The question is if we are so technologically developed why we are still using professional human translators instead of letting machines/softwares do this tedious job. There are quite a few reasons for this "why" and that's what we would be discussing in this article.
The first and main reason is that there is no software or machine translator available commercially or publically that can provide contextual or idiomatic translation (In simple words, highly quality accurate and professional translation). Most of the softwares or machine translators only provide literal translation which is, in most cases, not of much use. In fact, it can mislead the reader and even if it doesn't it sounds so unnatural and raw that a reader would hardly be paying attention to interpret what is being said.
Why don't we develop such software then? It's not a walk in the park to develop a software that can understand what is "in between the line meanings" of a document or text. It would take years to develop such software that can understand the context of the document and then translate it accordingly. For example, in English language when we talk about word "bat" it may refer to a bird or a baseball or cricket bat. Similarly meanings of different words change with the technical background. For example, in business law "consideration" means price or something in return while generally it refers to give attention or to carefully think about something. So it's not that easy to develop a software that can accommodate all these difficulties and problems.
And even if we are able to develop such software it would take too long and cost so much that hardly any translation company would be willing to pay such a price for translation purposes. They would rather pay professional human translators instead of buying such costly software. And again there are not only 3 or 4 languages spoken in the world. There are hundreds of languages and it takes different approach of translation when target language becomes a source language or vice versa.