For at least the last twenty years, I have been told that translators, including myself, will be replaced by machine translation within a decade because machine translation that is almost indistinguishable from human translation is just around the corner. For about ten years, I have been told that post-MT editing is the prevailing trend in the translation industry, and that whether I like it or not, MT-post editing is my future and the only future that translators can still hope for. And of course I have been also told  for all of these decades that I have been translating that translation users only care about the price and don’t really care about quality.

All of these statements are true, and at the same time, all of these statements are also oversimplifications and falsehoods, depending on what we mean by terms such as “cost”, “quality”, “human translation” and “translation industry”.

It is true for example that Google Translate can in some cases produce amazingly good translations that look like excellent human translation. But the reason for that is simple – Google Translate is not based on traditional approaches to machine translation. Instead, the machine picks for us an existing human translation from an incredibly large database of human translations. But even this approach to machine translation can work only to a limited extent, and incidentally, a little known fact is that it does not work nearly as well for example for translation between languages such as Japanese and English or Czech and English as it does for translation between common European languages.

I think that the final revolutionary breakthrough of machine translation that will finally be the undoing of people working in profession like mine will be still just around the corner for at least the next 20 or 30 years if not the next 2 or 3 centuries. More.

See: Patent Translator

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