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Will translating, as a job, survive ?
Thread poster: kistengeist224
Artem Vakhitov
Artem Vakhitov  Identity Verified
Kyrgyzstan
English to Russian
+ ...
It depends Nov 13, 2015

It will for quite some time, though this depends on the level of requirements. On the level that I work with, there's no way machines can replace humans at least in the course of my life. On the most basic level, translation as a job is already lost to Google and the likes.

 
Christine Andersen
Christine Andersen  Identity Verified
Denmark
Local time: 13:13
Member (2003)
Danish to English
+ ...
Or simply translating into a new Word without converting the source Nov 13, 2015

Gabriele Demuth wrote:

Hm, what about a typist correcting the errors or typing it into Word?


There are several workarounds, but they all involve humans!

Of course you could let a monolingual typist do it, not necessarily a translator (and I am notoriously a translator but not a typist....).

However, I can translate without sorting out the source. I just can't use my CAT.


 
Eugenio Garcia-Salmones
Eugenio Garcia-Salmones  Identity Verified
Spain
Local time: 13:13
Member (2015)
Russian to Spanish
+ ...
Not how we know Nov 14, 2015

I think what not. Will be a little amount of translators working only in the translation field. The majority probably will work also in other jobs. Now we see the evidently degradation of our work. The degrading auction of the projects in the global market, searching a cheaper translator

 
Gabriele Demuth
Gabriele Demuth  Identity Verified
United Kingdom
Local time: 12:13
English to German
Christine: Nov 14, 2015

Just thinking about economics, for a company it would probably be much cheaper to have the typist or junior secretary type out a large amount of text if a machine could then translate it, rather than outsourcing it and paying a translator to translate it at a much higher hourly rate - at least I hope it would be a much higher hourly rate!!

 
Christine Andersen
Christine Andersen  Identity Verified
Denmark
Local time: 13:13
Member (2003)
Danish to English
+ ...
That, of course, is the problem. Nov 14, 2015

Gabriele Demuth wrote:

Just thinking about economics, for a company it would probably be much cheaper to have the typist or junior secretary type out a large amount of text if a machine could then translate it, rather than outsourcing it and paying a translator to translate it at a much higher hourly rate - at least I hope it would be a much higher hourly rate!!


Many of these texts are medical records full of Latin and abbreviations ... Some of it is controlled language of a sort, so a dedicated, highly specialised machine might be able to take on some of it.

However, I would never trust a machine with the abbreviations!
I spend a lot of time considering which of the multiple options really fit the context.

Between the controlled language sections (regular routine medical checks, heart, lungs BP ...) there are terse, often irregular comments . I have seen inexperienced humans make really weird mistakes in those, and I hope I have not made too many myelf!!! But I check, check the context, ask the client and check again until I am sure they are right.

These are the kinds of jobs humans are almost certainly going to be doing in future. There is no room for error - either it is important for the patient or it is important because the results affect clinical trials.

A human and a CAT are far better options.
(But then one day the Danish health services might see the wisdom of releasing the electronic documents... You still need a human translator, but could eliminate the typist! )


[Edited at 2015-11-14 17:52 GMT]


 
564354352 (X)
564354352 (X)  Identity Verified
Denmark
Local time: 13:13
Danish to English
+ ...
Yes, considering the slow advances in MT Nov 15, 2015

When I was a language student in the '90s, the concept of MT was just emerging and it seemed to offer some fascinating prospects and perspectives. We sort of had the expectation that within a few years, massive corpuses of high-quality translated texts would be available to anyone. 20 years on, we are often told that MT has made great advances, but I wonder where the evidence is? If MT is making such great progress, why is it still not available as an at-your-fingertips app on our smartphones li... See more
When I was a language student in the '90s, the concept of MT was just emerging and it seemed to offer some fascinating prospects and perspectives. We sort of had the expectation that within a few years, massive corpuses of high-quality translated texts would be available to anyone. 20 years on, we are often told that MT has made great advances, but I wonder where the evidence is? If MT is making such great progress, why is it still not available as an at-your-fingertips app on our smartphones like so many other things?

I mean, in any form that you can actually rely on...

I'm not worried, I must admit... (famous last words? )

[Edited at 2015-11-15 07:40 GMT]
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Will translating, as a job, survive ?







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