Okay, sometimes it’s funny.
I try not to get on the “make fun of Machine Translation” bandwagon—for one thing, I think MT is cool. I also think it’s already quite useful for certain tasks. And I also think that in most cases the sort of media coverage that MT gets is either mostly speculation, or just too difficult to evaluate; after all, evaluating the quality of MT is an academic project unto itself.
And then there’s my pet peeve with regard to popular evaluation of MT: “round trip translation.” It works like this: First, put some English into an English » French MT system. Then, put that output back into a French » English system. “Hahah! It doesn’t look anything like the original!”
Except, why should it? We never evaluate how good a human translator is by asking them to do round-trip translation, so what’s the point of evaluating mechanical translation in that way?
But enough hedging, this is the part where I link to the really funny, bad MT quote. ☺
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2 comments.
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You are right, MT may be very useful for SOME tasks. Human translation is much more reliable, it’s beyond question, but in some cases I prefer machine translation - fast, free and available at all times. Surely, some translation made by computer can be funny and absurd, but with some experience I’ve trained myself to understand a machine-translated text (especially when I know a little the source language), as well as to write a text in such a way that it would be translated the most accurately by the computer. The first online translator I’ve tried was www.online-translator.com, later I started using other systems, www.freetranslation.com, because of other languages supported by the later. Firstly, I’ve tested the translation from English in to French, because I know the both languages, and I’ve seen that these translators are quite reliable for understanding the text in general lines.
As for the back translation, there are few situation which it can be needed, except for testing the MT quality :) When you put into machine translator a text which is already corrupted more or less, you will get back nothing but a more corrupted text.
Hi Sidonie,
Interesting point about people becoming accustomed to writing in a way that MT can handle easily. I’ve heard about people being trained to do that professionally for certain types of content — for some reason I want to say it had to do with automotive documentation, but I could be misremembering.
As for being able to get more out of MT if one knows both the source and target languages, again I agree. However, even the most dedicated polyglot is going to run into a language they don’t know sooner or later.
Which is all to say, of course, that there is room for MT, and room for translators.