Machine Translation – End of Road for Human Translators?
With the increasing popularity of online machine translations, one question that is increasingly being asked is this: Will there be a time when human translators become obsolete? Having worked as a translator for a few years, I have had some experience using online machine translations. Let me answer this question with a confident NO! I will explain why below. Firstly, the key reason why machine translations work badly is because they do not understand ‘context’. While humans intuitively understand what this means, ‘context’ is a difficult word to explain properly. Teaching it to a...
read moreCan a picture paint a thousand words?
Have you attended wedding dinners before? Ever wondered what the usual programs or activities are during the dinner? It is usually the emcees doing the opening, then introducing a video clip of photos of the bride and groom from young till now, before the couple into the ballroom. This is a typical kind of opening for a wedding dinner. Last night, I went to my cousin’s wedding. Her husband and her are quite “arty farty” kind of people, so instead of doing the photo collage, they came up with a comic strip – hand drawn by themselves. It was based on the lyrics of a...
read moreHuman vs Machine Translation – Which is better?
Machine Translation (MT) is generally understood as the process in which a “machine” (specificaly a computer program or software) is substituting words and phrases in one langauge to another. But if you do understand a little bit of the language in which you have translated your document into, you will quickly notice the translation problems. And the end result is definitely not what you have desired and clearly not of publishable quality. MT Softwares consist of dictionaries and algorithms to compose a sentence according to grammar rules of a language. The inherent difficulty...
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