subject: Translation Technology And The Translator [print this page] When the first PC versions of machine translation (MT) systems appeared it was widely assumed that they would be used in much the same way: to obtain 'rough gists' for information purposes or as 'draft translations' for later refinement. In both cases, it was also widely assumed that the principal users of MT systems would be translators or at least people with good knowledge of both source and target languages; and, in the cased of the use in large organizations, it was expected that most would be professionally trained translators.
However, during the late 1980s - and with increasing pace since the early 1990s - this paradigm and its assumptions have been broken by developments on a number of fronts.
Firstly, there has been the commercial availability of translator workstations, designed specifically for the use of professional translators; these are essentially computer-based translation tools and not intended to produce even partial translations fully automatically.
Secondly, the PC-based systems were bought and used by an increasingly large number of people with no interest in translation as such; they were being used as 'aids for communication', where translation quality was of much less importance.
Thirdly, there came the development of domain-specific systems by clients themselves: custom-built systems accepting input in constrained vocabulary and integrated closely in documentation and publication systems.
Fourthly, the growth of telecommunication networks with communication across many languages has led to a demand for translation devices to deal rapidly in real time with an immense and growing volume of electronic language.
Finally, the wider availability of databases and information resources in many different languages has led to the need for multilingual search and access devices which incorporate translation modules.
All current commercial and operational systems produce output which must be edited if it is to attain publishable quality. Only if rough translations are acceptable for information analysis purposes can the output of MT systems be left unrevised. Commercial developers of MT systems now always stress to customers that MT does not and cannot produce translations acceptable without revision: they stress the imperfect nature of MT output. They recognize fully the obligation to provide sophisticated facilities for the formatting, input, revision and publication of texts within total documentation processing from initial authoring to final dissemination.
In general most commentators agree that MT as such is quite inappropriate for professional translators. They do not want to be subservient to machines; few want to be revisers of poor quality MT output. What they have long been asking for are sophisticated translation tools. Since the early 1990s they can now have them in the shape of translation workstations. These offer translators the opportunity of making their work more productive without taking away the intellectual challenge of translation. Translator workstations combine access to dictionaries and terminological databanks, multilingual word processing, the management of glossaries and terminology resources, appropriate facilities for the input and output of texts.
The development of translation tools became feasible, firstly with the availability of real-time interactive computer environments in the late 1960s, then the appearance of word processing in the 1970s and of microcomputers in the 1980s and, subsequently, with intraorganisation networking and the development of larger computer storage capacities. Although workstations were developed outside the older MT research community, their appearance has led to a decline of the previous antagonism of translators to the MT community in general. They are seen to be as the direct result of MT research. Indeed, the 'translation memory' facility, which enables the storage of and access to existing translations for later reuse or revision or as sources of example translations, does in fact derive directly from what was initially 'pure' MT research on bilingual text alignment within a statistics-based approach to automatic translation.
Nowadays, the sales of translator workstations incorporating translation memories are increasing rapidly, particularly in Europe. Their success has built upon translators' experience with terminology management systems and upon the demonstrable improvements of productivity, terminological consistency and overall quality. The next stage of development will be the fuller integration of MT modules in order to provide automatic translation of sentences or text fragments when required, e.g. if the existing texts in a translation memory do not provide usable translation sources.
Aunes Oversettelser AS has been in the business for 26 years, and we are specialized in technical translations. We are specializing in the Nordic languages, and can offer services into Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian and Icelandic. The premier translation agency for Norway and the Nordic region! Technical translation services for businesses in the Nordic countries and translation agencies world-wide.
