subject: Reflections Of A Human Translator On Machine Translation [print this page] On the battlefield of human versus machine translation, human translators are the winners so far in the second decade of the 21st century.
Machine translation (MT) has become ubiquitous during the last decade. This may seem like an exaggeration to people who live in English-speaking countries, but everywhere else people use MT all the time on the Internet. The Japan Patent Office (JPO) has had for many years a free MT tool on its website for translations of all Japanese patent applications published since 1994. Google Translate is now available on the European Patent Office (EPO) and World Industrial Property Organization (WIPO) website for translations of patent applications between at least 28 languages, including many European languages as well as languages such as Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. I am sure that many patent agents, inventors, investors, and other people are using these MT programs all the time and find them very useful.
So how did machine translation, which is mostly free, change the battlefield of commercial translation, which is provided by human translators, usually for a lot of money?
I think that it is obvious that MT has not achieved what many people thought it would have achieved by now, namely to put human translators out of business. In fact, I think that MT has had precisely the opposite effect: instead of taking work away from experienced human translators, it created more work for them. Because most patents available in complicated languages such as German or Chinese or Japanese can now be translated into English in a few seconds with a few mouse clicks for example with Google Translate, many more patent agents are now aware of what is in these foreign patents than a decade ago, and some of them then in fact do decide to order a human translation based on the information which is provided by Google Translate or another machine translation tool.
But human translators will always be needed for patent translation
when we reach a new conclusion based on the information presented to us and based on our human experience, is something that we will never be able to program into a machine. If we could do that, machines could replace not only human translators, but also their clientspatent lawyers, medical doctors, judges, and engineers" is as true today as it was in the year 2000.
Machine translation will probably never replace human translators. I think that machine translation and general and specialized dictionaries available on the Web must have put a dent in the profit of publishers of specialized dictionaries.
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