“Translating machine”. The translators shudder when they hear those words! It’s partly out of disgust, due to a firm belief that a computer will never replace a superior human translator (like us!), partly because we’re afraid it will. So we vehemently disapprove of machine translation or carefully avoid the issue and hope, for example, that our customers won’t find out about the Serbian-English-Serbian translation tool, recently made available for free by the almighty Google (link below). )!
Because the fact is that Google’s translation tool, which now offers automatic English translation of Serbian websites and copied Serbian text blocks, is actually surprisingly good (we won’t talk about Google’s English-Serbian translation tool in this article, that is, the reverse direction, since it is quite horrible at the moment)!
Rather than pretend it doesn’t exist, we think it’s better to bring this issue out into the open and examine its implications for clients of translation companies and for the translation industry in general. So this will be the first of what is planned to be a series of articles looking at machine and machine translation, both in the context of Serbian-English translation and translation in general. In this article, we’ll take a brief look at the quality of Google’s Serbian-English machine translation and explain why we don’t think translators and translation companies working on the Serbian-English pair should worry too much about their livelihood right now.
An example of Google’s Serbian English translation
Let’s do a little experiment first. We took a paragraph of Serbian text (taken from a Serbian Wikipedia article) and pasted it into Google’s Serbian-English translation tool.
IN human translation from Serbian to English would read something like this:
A translation memory is made up of text segments in the source language and their translation into one or more target languages. These segments can be passages, paragraphs, sentences, or sentences. Translation memories do not handle individual words, but term bases. Research has shown that many companies that use multilingual documents use translation memory-based systems.
In some seconds, Google Translate generates the following English translation:
Translation memory consists of segments of the text in the source language and its translation into one or more target languages. These segments can be passages, paragraphs, sentences, or sentences. The individual words are not in the field of the translation memory, but are dealt with by the terminoloske database. Research shows that many companies have multilingual documentation systems that are used to translate the report.
Can you understand it? Other than some trouble the translator had identifying passive/active constructions and an unknown word, of course you can! It’s certainly much better than any Serbian-English machine translation tool we’ve tried before. If you look at what an old-style machine translation (to remain unnamed) did to this paragraph, perhaps you can begin to appreciate just how good Google Translate is:
Prevodilacka store sastoji oneself outside of textual segmentation in izvornom jeziku too njihovog prevoda in unity either about ciljanih jezika. Those segments could lie flinders, pasusi, recenice or fraze. Pojedinacne reci no de domenu prevodilacke memorije, vec oneself to them bave terminoloske baze. Istra%u017Eivanja pokazuju ought mnoge kompanije wo hay visejezicku dokumentaciju koriste sisteme with prevodilackom memorijom.
Je vous demand pardon? He was supposed to be English, in case you were wondering! And NO, we do not manipulate this in any way! Also, if anyone can tell us what “flinders” are, then they know more Middle English than we do!
Google Translate may not be as successful with all text as it was with this one, but it certainly is a major improvement over the previous example in virtually all cases! So maybe translators should think twice before ruling out machine translation from Serbian to English (and other languages, if this is anything to go by).
What makes Google Translate different?
Google’s system is a bit different than previous machine translations, as it uses a statistical method to analyze existing Serbian to English translations and applies what it learns to the new text. Old style systems simply use a dictionary to translate text word for word by “brute force” and tend not to be very successful. However, it should be noted that Google themselves have recognized that their statistical method has now hit a wall of diminishing returns and it is unlikely that, as technology currently stands, the standard of translation can be appreciably improved, and that is not happens. only for Serbian and English, but for all language combinations.
Death sentence for human translators?
So are we crazy to tell you all this? After all, translation companies rely on the (paid) work of human translators! What happens if all your customers go offline and start using Google Translate for free? In fact, we have already seen examples of amateur translators providing “Serbian to English translations” that have clearly been carried out using this tool. It’s only a matter of time before translation companies start receiving “pre-translated” texts (texts that look suspiciously like Google translations!) from clients and being asked to “just review this” for a fee. considerably lower than a translation from scratch. it would cost.
Well, we’d like to talk about some reasons why you and your clients should be aware of Google Translate for Serbian and English, and why we believe translation companies shouldn’t fear for their business:
- A translation company must value transparency and seek to work within the realities of the market. It doesn’t make long-term business sense to “hide” valuable resources like this from our customers! Besides, they will find out sooner or later! Rather, we must accept the reality that tools like this bring to the translation industry: the market will always change and we must be prepared to adapt, not cling to an outdated reality.
- We should want our customers use Google Translate for Serbian-English translation! After all, a translation company’s vision should be to enable its clients to communicate with other markets and cultures. So if this tool helps a client who only understands English to understand a Serbian text, then surely you have gone a long way towards achieving this vision!
- But the core of the problem, and the reason why translation companies have nothing to “fear” from Google Translate, is what you’ve been suspecting all along: computerized machine translation will not replace professional human translation from Serbian to English. (or any other language). ) whenever. Or let’s put it as a question: would you, as a marketing manager of, say, a Serbian company wanting to do business in the West, entrust the translation of your website or corporate magazine into English to a machine translation tool? The simple reality is that no, you wouldn’t.
- This is not necessarily to take down machine translation tools: after all, they are an easy target for us superior human translators! They may well have their applications, and we can discuss this in another article. This is simply to say that any company that is serious about a given market, given the current quality of machine translation, will settle for a humane and professional translation of their promotional materials. After all, we said Google’s Serbian English translation was good, but it’s not THAT good! In fact, it is not good enough.
Perhaps in a future article we’ll also look at some of the differences between machine translation and human translation and investigate some of the reasons why, despite the notable advances and positive things we’ve said about Google Translate, translation software Automatic translation is currently not a serious option for professional translation, Serbian to English or any other language combination, and why it may never be. In fact, we are deeply concerned about potential misuses of a tool like this, in an environment where, even now, translation is often not taken seriously enough.
In the meantime though, check out the tool and you might just open up a whole new world of Serbian translated web content that you couldn’t access before. Try Serbian-English and English-Serbian Google translation here.