I have been translating for the past 15 years. It has been hard, amusing, stressful, exciting. The one job I wouldn’t trade with any other else. An endless love-hate relationship. I could not live without it. I had to, though, for a few months, about six years ago, when another relationship started, an even more fulfilling but definitely not less complicated: the one with my newborn daughter.
When I got back to the business, I had to get in touch with all my old clients, and try to find new ones. The first job I was assigned came from a brand new one I met through a social networking site for translation. After a brief email exchange, he sent me the document, he greeted me and he warned me: DO NOT USE MACHINE TRANSLATION!!!!!!!!!! (This was the amount of exclamation marks he actually used.)
“I must have missed something while on my maternity leave” – I thought. What did he mean? I did not really bother at first, I politely said: “OK!!!”, I went on with my task and, once delivered, the client seemed really satisfied with the quality of the document I sent him and that was basically it. Strangely enough, though, I found myself tossing and turning for a while: that cryptic intimidation kept on bugging me. Then I went on with my new life based on diapers, glossaries and late nights in taking care of powder milk and project deadlines.
A short time after that, one of my acquaintances asked me to translate his biography: basically he decided it was time for his breakthrough and he needed a change in his working life. He told me the document was already translated into English, it just quickly needed to be reviewed and polished. Easy peasy.
He sent me the text and after reading the first few lines I felt totally puzzled. That was not English, nor was any other globally recognised language I was aware of. Impossible to explain what I had been commissioned, if not with an (embarrassing, to say the least) example. Ready, steady, go:
“Marco Sofas could not. Marco Sofas was fired from brothers and cousins & Co Brands and has made literally a coraggiosissimo innerspace.. He opened the business of her dreams, the only thing I had always wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps: take care of the vineyards that they produced wine of his adoratissima Earth.”
For the love of Congruence, what on earth was that? Just to make a long story short, the guy decided to act smart (not!), by using an automatic translation tool and thought the machine-translated document would have looked presentable and just needed a few small adjustments here and there. I asked for the source file, which at first he thought was not useful to hand me, considered the extreme “easiness” of the task; I got it and read it and I did not know whether to laugh or cry. He did use a machine translation tool and thought he could get away with it. Here is the amended translation of that short piece, to get a sense of this whole anecdote:
“Marco Divani could not take it anymore. Marco Divani resigned from his position at Fratelli e Cugini Marche & Co and took an incredibly brave leap into the unknown..he started the business of his dreams, the one and only thing he have always dreamt of: follow in his father’s footsteps and look after the vineyards where the wine of his beloved land came from.”
After that episode I finally realised what it was meant by machine translation and how this concept could be really harmful for translation professionals. I did some research and found out what had become quite a common practice: asking a translator to proofread a machine-translated document. The translators would get proofreading rates for a job which is always longer and more complicated than translating a document from scratch. Not a good deal, if you ask me. On the bright side, this practice did not become as popular as highly respected professionals, human translators in the field dreaded at first.
Can a machine replace a human being when it comes to translations? The answer is one and only: no way Jose! What are the right skills for such a demanding job? What makes a translator a professional one? First of all, humility. But then again presumption is essential. Surely translators must be able to think rationally all the time. But, on the other hand, they shall not forget to be led by their instinct. If they have their own style and they are not afraid to use it, les jeux sont faits! Can a machine do all that? I seriously doubt it.
It is easy to lose the plot, when it comes to translating. And I mean it literally, for once. Only a competent human translator can get through the steep paths of decoding various kinds of documents and deep inside be sure to get, sooner than later, to the finish line and in great shape.
I am not saying that developers of such tools haven’t done a great job to some extent: in fact, in some cases, it could be very useful to translate a sentence from a language into another thanks to a machine translation application, in order to understand at least some of the context or to try to grab the inception of a meaning. But that’s just sort of an emergency device to be used, a very first step to which many others have to follow in order to reach the excellence this industry demands.
Actually this whole article is mainly based on translations from Italian into English and the other way around (my main language combination). But I can assume it applies to the whole translation world.
One last consideration, before concluding. Once I read this amazing thought: “English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment, and education – sometimes it is sheer luck, like getting across a street”. Who wrote that? I am not sure. What I am sure about is that many people claim they have a very good knowledge of English, but translating is not knowing a language, it is to rule over it. And even the greater machine can never reach this enviable standard.