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Future of freelance translators in auto-translated world
Thread poster: Ömer Maraş
Samuel Murray
Samuel Murray  Identity Verified
Netherlands
Local time: 09:30
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
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The urge to be different May 25, 2020

Inez Ulrich wrote:
What I've noticed lately is a weird obsession about delivering translations that do not resemble Google translations.


A similar thing has existed in my native language for many years. The fear of contamination from English was (and still is) so great that whenever a word or phrase sounds too similar to the English, it is rejected in favour of something that sounds sufficiently different. This enriched the language on the one hand, through novel bastardisations, but impoverished it on the other hand, by suppressing the use of many perfectly valid and etymologically justifiable words and phrases. Even in cases where something can be said in more than way in English, the translator will deliberately choose a wording whose similar-sounding equivalent is *not* present in his particular source text. In so doing, the translator can justify himself to the reviewer and the client for "not having followed the English source text", even if his translation does have a similar-sounding English word of phrase. In a similar vein, I sometimes see reviewers attempting to improve a translation by replacing conjunctions or prepositions that sound more like English with ones that look less like English.

That this is now happening with machine translations is not surprising.

Even machine translators are catching up on this, though. With older rule-based and even statistical machine translation systems, the order of words and phases in my language followed the English word and phrase order closely, and one way to de-MT such a text was to turn the word order around in a way that no machine would be able to do. But neural machine translations are able to do that, and they do. In fact, I often find myself moving words and phrases *back* to positions that appear closer to the source text after the machine translator had moved them to positions that are supposed to make the text look less like a machine translation. This is the big downside of neural machine translation -- the focus is less on accuracy of meaning, and more on "not looking like a machine translation".


[Edited at 2020-05-25 08:10 GMT]


Philippe Etienne
 
DZiW (X)
DZiW (X)
Ukraine
English to Russian
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You pay as they go May 26, 2020

I mentioned a story about my colleague who accepted a seemingly remunerative job with a tiny* remark to differ from popular MT engines… Obviously, this took her several extra hours weeping on unpaid comparisons.

As far as highly educated assumes well-paid high quality jobs, the modern good-enough (for who?) translation more and more appears a mere fast-typist [undereducated] jobbing. Moreover, the post-MT trends contribute to a post-translation Quazi-Interlingua Digitaliz,
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I mentioned a story about my colleague who accepted a seemingly remunerative job with a tiny* remark to differ from popular MT engines… Obviously, this took her several extra hours weeping on unpaid comparisons.

As far as highly educated assumes well-paid high quality jobs, the modern good-enough (for who?) translation more and more appears a mere fast-typist [undereducated] jobbing. Moreover, the post-MT trends contribute to a post-translation Quazi-Interlingua Digitaliz, which can be gaily overtoned from Unthinkable → Radical → Acceptable → Sensible → Popular, and finally, adopted as the cheap Policy.

In fact, unchangeable poorly PEMTed TMs keep finding their way even in the international organizations and big name companies, forgetting about the human reader used to Goorgling.
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Future of freelance translators in auto-translated world







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