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Machine Translations: Should Proz.com advertise MT jobs?
Thread poster: Lingopro
Aurora Humarán
Aurora Humarán  Identity Verified
Local time: 22:52
English to Spanish
Sad but true Jun 4, 2013

Ty Kendall wrote:

Just to answer the main question concisely, they shouldn't but they will.

Proz won't stop advertising MT jobs for the same reason it won't stop advertising jobs "offering" 0.0000001USD per source word.

I happen to disagree with that, but I also know it's not going to change.



Yep!


 
Aurora Humarán
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Misleading pronouns Jun 4, 2013

Siegfried Armbruster wrote:

Most of you might not have noticed yet, but ProZ not only changed its design. Just hover over the logo in the top left corner you will see:

ProZ.com global directory of translation services

MT and post editing definitely belongs to "translation services". What do you guys believe why this was changed? The MT companies have tons of money to spend and they also need post editors. ProZ is just following what they preach - they are diversifying their services to also serve the MT companies.




Exactly, Siegfried!

The thing is that veterans like you or me realize that in statements like "this is a great opportunity for us", 'us' includes agencies already involved in MT (Trusted Translations, to mention one) and software vendors (AsiaOnline), but not... us! This is the risk of co-habiting with stakeholders who have interests that are in conflict with ours*. However, as (for different reason$) we share conferences and portals with agencies and software vendores, junior or less alert colleagues may end up believing that "us" embraces the three legs, while it does not. MT is an opportunity for them, and professional suicide for us: the more we post-edit, the less we will be necessary. We are teaching the machine to replace us (unless you post-edit in your own PC helping nobodby but yourself, increasing nobody's corpus but yours, in which case MT is another tool like an e-dictionary or triple monitor).

From Capita's website: "Machine translation technology is improving all the time and the translations are becoming more accurate and sophisticated. The amount of editing required of a human translator will gradually decrease and this approach to translating will become more and more cost-effective."

As lawyers say: Acknowledgement from the parties make discoveries non-essential.

* Pepsi-Cola can shake hands with Coca-Cola, but Pepsi-Cola will never have Coca-Cola's shareholders in its Annual Meeting. Their interests are not only different, but opposite! Same here.


 
Giles Watson
Giles Watson  Identity Verified
Italy
Local time: 02:52
Italian to English
In memoriam
HEROES and VILLAINS Jun 4, 2013

Dion Wiggins wrote:

9: Often for complex topics, MT can be faster to edit than first past HT. We have a client who translated 8 million words of highly technical content from EN to ZH. There were more errors in the MT output that the first pass human translator and on first glance the MT looked much worse than the human translation. But metrics showed clearly that the nature of the errors that a human made were very different to that of the MT. The human translators made many more errors on terminology, but was very accurate on grammar. The MT was very accurate of terminology, but made more grammar errors. The terminology errors made by the human translator were slow to find and correct. The grammar errors made by MT were obvious and fast to correct. So even though there were more errors in the MT output, it ended taking half the time to edit the same segment as the human translation.



Thanks for this, Dion.

Let me first say that I understand your business model and have absolutely no problem with you advertising your services on Proz. You are selling soda and I, like most freelancers, try to offer a more exclusive product, perhaps not an '82 Pétrus but at least some sort of upmarket energy drink.

There are, as you say, limitations to your approach. It's not going to do a great job on texts where the organisation of thought and context-appropriate syntax of the target differ radically from the source (not a criticism - you are aware of this). How, for example, does it deal with the differing distributions of meaning across noun and verb phrases in English and the neo-Latin languages? I know, it doesn't. Which implies that unless the job is gargantuan, it's still quicker to retranslate anything but the simplest (ie, most "technical", lexis-focused) texts than to post-edit, at least if you want a product that is enjoyable to read as opposed to merely comprehensible.

Over the past two decades, I have had the opportunity to coordinate and edit the work of a fair number of IT>EN translators. They tend to fall into one of two categories: the ones who, like machine translation engines, restrict themselves to juggling the words and the select few who elegantly transpose the information the source text contains. Mentally, I classify the latter as HEROES (Highly Effective Resources Offering Expert Services) and the former as VILLAINS (Variously Instructed Language Learners And Incompetent Native Speakers).

Right now, I can't think of an acronym that includes the letters "M" and "T".


[Edited at 2013-06-04 06:07 GMT]


 
Attila Piróth
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MT@EC Jun 4, 2013

Dion Wiggins wrote:

4: MT is not a replacement for humans and never will be.


Well, let's see how things are at the EU's DGT. We are not talking about the customer support and knowledge base for bug-ridden products of giant software companies but the translation services that are instrumental in establishing a truly multilingual Europe.

To keep pace with ever faster technological developments, in July 2013 DGT will deploy a new machine translation service (MT@EC) for use by other Commission departments, offering two way machine translation between English and all other official languages (at least) and combining state-of-the-art machine translation solutions with DGT’s wealth of internal language resources.


Why?

Like the other EU institutions and the public sector throughout the EU, the Commission is confronted with the dual challenge of reducing costs while adding value: delivering more efficiently and coherently, cutting red tape, better explaining its activities and their benefits.

DGT is no exception to this challenge. With our new structure, coming into effect on 1 January, we aim to do better with less. In 2013, we will start seeing the first effects of staff cuts. This is a reality which we will have to live with in the years to come and which we will address by pooling translation resources and refocusing on our core business, by optimising the use of all (in-house, external and technological) resources available, by pursuing sustainable staffing levels through enhanced succession planning and post allocation schemes and by intensifying DGT-wide knowledge management.


So, "MT is not a replacement for humans and never will be"? Come on.


 
Tomás Cano Binder, BA, CT
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Thank you! Jun 4, 2013

Dion Wiggins wrote:
6: There are many people that want to edit MT and are finding it lucrative. There has been a challenge with some LSPs who have not compensated properly for MT editing work and this has made translation professionals uncomfortable with MT as they feel they will not be compensated fairly. Not all LSPs are like this and many do pay fair rates.

I have expressed already, I do not feel that MT post-editing is my kind of fish at present, but I sincerely thank you for taking the time to give your point of view even in the face of the present distrust towards this emerging branch of our industry. The views you shared are most interesting.

I see a big need for training both for LSPs and for translators who do post-editing. Perhaps developers of MT systems should spend more time promoting this technology among translators, not LSPs only, and they would help change the perception among us translators.


 
Attila Piróth
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Conflicting interests Jun 4, 2013

Aurora Humarán wrote:

Exactly, Siegfried!

The thing is that veterans like you or me realize that in statements like "this is a great opportunity for us", 'us' includes agencies already involved in MT (Trusted Translations, to mention one) and software vendors (AsiaOnline), but not... us! This is the risk of co-habiting with stakeholders who have interests that are in conflict with ours*. However, as (for different reason$) we share conferences and portals with agencies and software vendores, junior or less alert colleagues may end up believing that "us" embraces the three legs, while it does not. MT is an opportunity for them, and professional suicide for us: the more we post-edit, the less we will be necessary. We are teaching the machine to replace us (unless you post-edit in your own PC helping nobodby but yourself, increasing nobody's corpus but yours, in which case MT is another tool like an e-dictionary or triple monitor).


This is the heart of the matter. There are conflicting interests. Failure to recognize other stakeholders' interest can seriously harm one's own.

Of course, TAUS and the like present lots of opportunities. I'm sure there is abundant profit to be made from free, "community" initiatives like ACCEPT:

In January 2012, Translators without Borders (partnered with the University of Geneva, Acrolinx, the University of Edinburgh and Symantec) launched the international research project ACCEPT. ACCEPT is an acronym meaning Automated Community Content Editing Portal. This project’s goal is to enable machine translation for the emerging community content standard. [9] Lexcelera is also participating in this project.[10] The project will run for thirty-six months.


Share your skills and expertise for the benefit of all, right?

When skills and technology become split because the latter is no longer possessed by the professional, the status of the professional becomes less stable. And when technology takes the upper hand over skills - as in the combo of skyrocketing productivity expectations with lowered quality requirements - the professional becomes a language technician, an interchangeable element in the process. With the obvious financial consequences.


 
Aurora Humarán
Aurora Humarán  Identity Verified
Local time: 22:52
English to Spanish
... Jun 4, 2013

Dion Wiggins wrote:

4: MT is not a replacement for humans and never will be. It is a productivity enhancer.



With all due respect, Dion. MT *is* a replacement for humans. Whenever ProZ.com or other portals send us an offer to post-edit a document MTranslated... a translator HAS already been replaced! (The one that should have been in charge of the document translated by a machine. S/he was not contacted. A machine replaced him/her). It's so... obvious.

Is that enough? No. You (agencies who are already involved in MT and MT vendors) need us because the final quality of MT alone is not enough (as of today). So you need somebody to correct, and all of us here (us = translators) want to... translate. Some of us are also proofreaders and copy editors, in which case we proofread or copy edit what a translator has translated.

Two parties of this story keep repeating what you say (MT is not a replacement for humans), and both are (with all due respect, again) completely wrong:

1) Software vendors and agencies already in the MT business. Why? To convince us (translators) that there is no threat whatsoever and that MT is a great opportunity for us (translators) as it will increase documents needing translation. That is not true! Those parties who hate to invest (they would use the verb spend and not invest, of course) in translation will start using online MT and that's it. Neither translator nor post-editor will be contacted. In fact, many companies are already doing that, and have MTranslated websites. (I see many examples every day). So... No. There will not be more work (for us, translators) as a result of MT. Totally the opposite. And regarding the new "niche", post-editors, as I said above (and not that I discovered Coca-Cola's formula, it's just so... obvious!), the more we post-edit, the less we'll be necessary. Seeing post-editing as a great opportunity is short-sighted. Will an army of 200,000 post-editors be needed today? Capita explained it very well in their website! The more they post-edit (teach the machine to replace them), the less they will be necessary, and expontentially so. May be in a couple of months 90,000 will have work. In a year, 3,214, and very soon 68 post-editors will be enjoying this "opportunity."

2) Romantic translators who keep repeating that "they will never replace us." NEWSFLASH! If you receive an offer to post-edit MTranslated content, a translator HAS ALREADY BEEN REPLACED. For now, the post-editor is necessary.

Calling a spade a spade.

Regards,

Au

[Edited at 2013-06-04 10:14 GMT]


 
Giles Watson
Giles Watson  Identity Verified
Italy
Local time: 02:52
Italian to English
In memoriam
Markets, common or otherwise Jun 4, 2013

Attila Piróth wrote:

And when technology takes the upper hand over skills - as in the combo of skyrocketing productivity expectations with lowered quality requirements - the professional becomes a language technician, an interchangeable element in the process. With the obvious financial consequences.



If the customer - the EU, for example - wants higher productivity and lower quality, that is what, sooner or later, the market will deliver. On the plus side, there is still plenty of work around for HEROES (see previous post) and, FWIW, I agree with Dion that the explosion in more or less fit-for-purpose MT will likely help customers appreciate the value of better-quality work, boosting overall demand for translation.

I'm confident most professional translators can adapt.


 
Dion Wiggins
Dion Wiggins
Local time: 08:52
English to Thai
Many MT projects create jobs for translators and post editors Jun 4, 2013

There seems to be a false assumption that if content has been processed by MT then it has taken the job of a human. There is a huge amount of content that simply would not have been translated if it were not for MT. If many cases the post editing work for a human translator that comes from that project would not have been possible. There are many projects that are now viable as a business case due to MT + PE that were not at all viable as HT only. Without MT, these projects simply would not have... See more
There seems to be a false assumption that if content has been processed by MT then it has taken the job of a human. There is a huge amount of content that simply would not have been translated if it were not for MT. If many cases the post editing work for a human translator that comes from that project would not have been possible. There are many projects that are now viable as a business case due to MT + PE that were not at all viable as HT only. Without MT, these projects simply would not have existed.

There will be some projects where MT is doing the work that a human did in the past. What many do not appreciate is that as the budget can now be spread over more content, more content is translated and this results in more post editing. Enterprises are not spending less because they are using MT, they are spending the same budget or more as they are getting more return – by this I mean they are getting higher sales, higher customer satisfaction, expanding into more markets, etc.

We have projects where we translate 500 million words per day of patent content. We do this every day from JA, KO, ZH and other languages into English. This content is published as raw MT. We translate all 13 million historical patents and all patents published in the current year as they are released from Japanese to English at least once every year. As the engines improve, the document is then translated again so that it is higher quality than before. We do the same in the other languages. At market rates it would take a human translator 152,257 years to translate all existing Japanese patents into English and would cost more than US$ 40 billion. Clearly this is not a viable business case without the help of MT and clearly this did not take the job of human translators away as humans could not do this task. However, once the patents are translated, they can be discovered via search engine in English. If the patent is important to the searcher, then they either get it translated or post edited by a human – another new job that have never been possible without MT.

We have worked on many projects that contained HT only elements, MT only elements and MT + PE elements. None of this work, including the HT only elements, would have been possible if MT had not made the entire projects business case viable.

In other projects that we have worked in, MT has taken over a role where in the past human translators did the work, but in many of these cases, the budget was reallocated into translating even more content and engaging translators for other jobs for the same client as a result. If the client gets a result from an market where they provided content, then they will produce more content in the market. So again MT has helped create jobs. If the client could not translate important content due to budget constraints, then they would not have had the success that enables them to translate more.

In addition to the translation and post editing work, there are new jobs in training post editors, data management, software integration, custom engine improvement, rule development and much more that have been created due to the maturing of MT technology.

Let us not forget the end customer also, as noted in one of my earlier examples, there have been multiple projects with case studies where the final content was delivered faster, lower cost and higher quality than a human only approach. Many of these projects fit the above criteria where they would not have existed had it not been for MT being part of the equation.

It is a false assumption to label every MT + PE project as a project that takes work away from human translators. The above examples of real world projects clearly show otherwise. Such statements are no more true than saying that every job a translator gets takes away a content writers job in the target language, therefore translators must be evil as they are taking work from local language content authors.

There are many that will be against MT even if it doubled the amount of work and income that translators make. However, for many individuals, not just LSPs, there have been notable benefits with new jobs, new career opportunities and well paid positions. Many of the MT related and created roles even pay better than the many other traditional roles in the translation industry.

When it comes to making a profit, the LSP is the one spending notable amounts of marketing and sales efforts to win projects. Without the LSPs that many have voiced anger against for making a profit in this thread and others related to it, there would be far less work for individual translators.

But the bottom line that overrides all the arguments whether you are pro MT or against MT is that there will always be a huge amount of human work, content is growing at a rate faster than all the human translators in the world could translate. MT is one of the tools that will help get more of this content translated than a human only approach can deliver. If you don’t want to edit MT, then carry on with human only work, there will be plenty of it. If you want to edit MT, you can do that too. They can coexist quite happily and there is plenty of room for both models of translation to prosper with or without each other.


[Edited at 2013-06-04 17:38 GMT]
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Attila Piróth
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France
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Hmm Jun 4, 2013

Dion Wiggins wrote:

4: MT is not a replacement for humans and never will be.


Then

Dion Wiggins wrote:

There will be some projects where MT is doing the work that a human did in the past.


What shall we make of this contradiction? Should argument #4, a recurrent one in similar debates, is invalid in its present form?

Enterprises are not spending less because they are using MT, they are spending the same budget or more as they are getting more return – by this I mean they are getting higher sales, higher customer satisfaction, expanding into more markets, etc.


Would you care to comment on the high-profile, well-paid translators in the EU example to which "they are spending the same budget or more" does not apply?


 
Jeff Allen
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Multiplelanguages
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review of the new EU MT system Jun 4, 2013

I provided an opinion video about the "new" Machine Translation system at the European Union during the same week that the press releases appeared on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=HgeLLbYjv9Q

Jeff

Attila Piróth wrote:

Dion Wiggins wrote:

4: MT is not a replacement for humans and never will be.


Well, let's see how things are at the EU's DGT. We are not talking about the customer support and knowledge base for bug-ridden products of giant software companies but the translation services that are instrumental in establishing a truly multilingual Europe.

To keep pace with ever faster technological developments, in July 2013 DGT will deploy a new machine translation service (MT@EC) for use by other Commission departments, offering two way machine translation between English and all other official languages (at least) and combining state-of-the-art machine translation solutions with DGT’s wealth of internal language resources.


Why?

Like the other EU institutions and the public sector throughout the EU, the Commission is confronted with the dual challenge of reducing costs while adding value: delivering more efficiently and coherently, cutting red tape, better explaining its activities and their benefits.

DGT is no exception to this challenge. With our new structure, coming into effect on 1 January, we aim to do better with less. In 2013, we will start seeing the first effects of staff cuts. This is a reality which we will have to live with in the years to come and which we will address by pooling translation resources and refocusing on our core business, by optimising the use of all (in-house, external and technological) resources available, by pursuing sustainable staffing levels through enhanced succession planning and post allocation schemes and by intensifying DGT-wide knowledge management.


So, "MT is not a replacement for humans and never will be"? Come on.


 
Balasubramaniam L.
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Crisis - 2 Jun 5, 2013

Giles Watson wrote:
I'm confident most professional translators can adapt.


Older translators will recall a similar kind of threat perception a few decades ago when translation agencies were emerging and becoming the chief intermediary between translator and client. Before that the norm was for a translator to directly work with his client.

Agencies, many translators feared, would drastically cut into their earnings and the freelance translator as known then would cease to exist.

That prophesy was not fulfilled. Agencies did momentarily bring down rates but by providing more organized marketing of translation services they also brought in a lot of new work on the table which enabled the recruitment of many more freelance translators as the pie had grown larger because of the marketing input of the agencies.

Translators working solo would not have succeeded in growing the translation work pie to current levels. The agencies, whatever their effect has been on individual translation rates, have definitely contributed to scaling up the translation industry.

Today few translators work for direct clients and most translators work through agencies.

So, the translator community successfully weathered Crisis - 1 - the Rise of Agencies.

Now, we are faced with a similar crisis - Crisis - 2 - The Rise of MT.

It threatens to change the way we work and earn our living, and to some it seems to threaten the very existence of the freelance translator. But I think just as we weathered crisis-1, we translators will also weather crisis-2.

Here are a few silver linings that I see in the dark MT cloud, which have already been pointed out by Dion -

- MT has great potential to bring in more work on the table, as things that are too vast to be translated by human hands, such as legacy material accumulated over the decades with companies, governments, universities, etc., can be processed because of MT. Since all this work cannot be brought to acceptable quality by MT alone, it will generate a lot of work for translators, though it may not be traditional translation work.

- It will highlight the importance of the human element in quality translation as human translated material would stand out against MT in terms of quality, elegance and ease of comprehension. Thus human translation can now charge a premium over MT which would have the effect of at least protecting our current rates.

- It will create new job opportunities that can be exploited by translators in areas of MT technology development, training of translators to work with MT, MT-post editing, etc.



Having talked of the silver lining, here is the cloud part, the negative side -

- a lot of routine translation like technical manuals, may now get done by MT + post-editing, this might generate work for those translators who are willing to take up post-editing, but deprive other translators who earlier used to do these manuals themselves of work.

- a lot of limited-use translation such as internal documents, correspondence, etc., which are not meant for mass viewing and where comprehension rather than linguistic elegance is the requirement, will be done by MT, so people earning a living by doing this kind of translation will find themselves out of work.

- freelance translators would have to adapt in a major way their working style to adapt to the changed situation in their industry because of the emergence of MT, just as they had to a few decades ago when agencies emerged on the scene. And none likes to change his/her familiar patterns of life. This will be a major issue for many translators.


 
Giles Watson
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Italy
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Italian to English
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Agencies? What agencies? Jun 5, 2013

Balasubramaniam L. wrote:

Today few translators work for direct clients and most translators work through agencies.



Is this true?

How can you hope to achieve any visibility in the marketplace if you work for customers (agencies) who have every incentive to disguise the fact that you exist?

If the customer comes to you then you have a better chance of negotiating a good rate.


 
Aurora Humarán
Aurora Humarán  Identity Verified
Local time: 22:52
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... Jun 5, 2013

Balasubramaniam L. wrote:

Agencies, many translators feared, would drastically cut into their earnings and the freelance translator as known then would cease to exist.



Hi! I was there, but nobody ever mentioned that freelance translators as known would cease to exist. The concern was about money, and turned out to be justified. It's a pity I cannot post here how much a huge agency charges its final clients, while it is well known in the market for the low rates they pay. As we all know, this format of huge margins applies to most agencies. So the fear was more than justified. We were right.

However, what followed was even worse than our most awful fears as agencies now go to OUR clients and sell them translations that are faster and cheaper, destroying a perception we have been trying to consolidate for years (that we need X amount of time to deliver professional translations, and that our professional work deservs Y amount of money). They are highly damaging our profession. They now confirm our clients that everything can be translated in a second and for lower rates.

Some translators lost the CAT tools discounts war (I didn't because I do not accept CAT tools discounts). Are we also going to loose an even more cruel war by teaching the machine to replace us (ie, by post-editing)? I hope my colleagues understand that the lie of PEMT as "an opportunity" will probably feed thousands of post-editors in the near future, hundreds a little later, and a dozen in a couple of months more.

Capita, an agency, explained in very well.

Another interesting exchange here:

@AMHumaran Thanks for your comments too and providing me with a link to your interview. From a translators point of view you are absolutely right, and I have addressed a point you made about feeding MT vendors machines. From a commercial point of view, its a shrewd move which will help develop MT capabilities and save costs. However, it comes at a high cost to the translator who will become increasingly unimportant in the process. Just like you stated in your interview.

http://www.languageconnect.net/blog/2013/05/machine-translation-mt-is-post-editing-the-silver-lining/


 
Aurora Humarán
Aurora Humarán  Identity Verified
Local time: 22:52
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To Dion Jun 5, 2013

«There seems to be a false assumption that if content has been processed by MT then it has taken the job of a human.»

Trust me that these days translators are being offered documents to be post edited that are not these 500,000,000 word docs you mention, but standard documents of approx 5,000 words or so. So a machine has certainly replaced the translator who should have been in charge of the translation (as I explained in my example above). Who is the translator in charge of a do
... See more
«There seems to be a false assumption that if content has been processed by MT then it has taken the job of a human.»

Trust me that these days translators are being offered documents to be post edited that are not these 500,000,000 word docs you mention, but standard documents of approx 5,000 words or so. So a machine has certainly replaced the translator who should have been in charge of the translation (as I explained in my example above). Who is the translator in charge of a document I am invited to post edit? MT has taken the job of that translator.

«There is a huge amount of content that simply would not have been translated if it were not for MT.»

Is this information clients have shared with you? “We had zillions of words waiting to be translated but as translators are so expensive we prefer to buy your 100,000 USD software?” (I do know some companies even have in-house linguists to have their own software developed to save in translators, of course, but let's not consider exceptions, and let’s talk about the huge translation business which used to belong to translators).

Reading your huge numbers, I see a contradiction: most translators complain that they do not have work and/or are forced to work as teachers, secretaries, etc. while the world is full of potential work for them. And this happens here, there and everywhere.

«There will be some projects where MT is doing the work that a human did in the past.»

I can certify that as I keep receiving many offers with this format, and this is becoming more and more frequent.

«What many do not appreciate is that as the budget can now be spread over more content, more content is translated and this results in more post editing.»

That can happen in a few examples, and fighting this is as silly as fighting the use of Bing and the like for gist translations. I do know there is no threat to me when a click in FB allows me to understand what a colleague is discussing with her colleagues in their native language.

We are complaining about the fact that this practice is spreading and reaching what used to be our circuit.

Regarding your comment “this results in more post editing,” as we both certainly agree, the more translators post edit, the less they will be necessary. I do not buy it that companies will start producing information to justify MT. I do not know how many years you have been in the T&I world, but I have been in the business for many years, working both for local an international clients, and trust me that clients in general translate as little as possible.

Also, if you (MT vendor) consolidate the idea of faster and cheaper, you are harming a perception we have been trying to change for centuries. Should we be joining your party, Dion? Put a hand on your heart and answer that please. This clearly shows that you are in the Pepsi-Cola Board, and I am in the Coca-Cola Board. With all due respect, let's not be naïve, Dion. We are both business persons, and your business negatively affects mine. And I understand that if all translators of the world refuse to post edit, the resulting translations as of today are not ready to be published (clients know this too).

«If the client gets a result from an market where they provided content, then they will produce more content in the market. So again MT has helped create jobs.»

Sorry, but all the examples you have given sound very weird to me, and clearly aim at convincing translators (not me, for sure) that MT is a blessing for us. If a client finds that MT helps them save money, trust me they will not start writing more Financial Statements (after all, a fiscal year always lasts 365 days, and there are only 4 Financial Statements), or generating more Informed Consents, or adding new pages to their websites. Lever will not draft more contracts because translation will be now cheaper to them (thanks to your software).

We (translators) know very well how clients perceive translation, and out of our exchanges in international fora, this seems to be a universal truth. No, MT will not result in our clients producing more documents.

«In addition to the translation and post editing work, there are new jobs in training post editors, data management, software integration, custom engine improvement, rule development and much more that have been created due to the maturing of MT technology.»

Yes, I have heard this argument whenever MT needs to be justified. With all due respect, Dion, I do not want the consolation price. I want to translate.

«It is a false assumption to label every MT + PE project as a project that takes work away from human translators.»

No, it is not. If you are willing to see it with your own eyes, provide me with your email address, and I will forward to you the proposals I receive (which justified this thread, after all: should ProZ.com advertise MT jobs?) Again: those jobs we are offered were not translated by a human translator, but by a machine. The first time I received a project like this (many years ago), I wrote an article that is still in the proZian data base. I now receive similar offers much more often. Why should I be celebrating?

«There are many that will be against MT even if it doubled the amount of work and income that translators make.»

Because we are aware of what will happen in the mid term, Dion! At the beginning some people will get money from PEMT, but as the corpus becomes richer, translators (turned into post editors) will be less necessary. Please correct me if this concept is wrong: the more you post edit, the less you are necessary. Of course, by then you would have sold your product and would be happy with your ROI, but thousands of translators will be out of work, and the ones still post editing will be soon forced to do other things, as only tiny details will need adjustments. I have been following Tradukka, and the results it produces are… unbelievable (sadly unbelievable, for us).

«If you don’t want to edit MT, then carry on with human only work, there will be plenty of it.»

No, Dion, as companies will start spreading the word about this possibility you sell, others will feel tempted to start saving on a cost that has always been unpleasant to them: translators. I have been in the corporate world for many years (and in great companies where I learnt a lot: Reynolds, Coca-Cola, Cyanamid, Providian Financial), and I know that companies see PR as an investment, HR as an investment, but translation as an expenditure. Been there! I insist: this hurts our profession a lot, even in underlying concepts like the value of our profession, how the world perceives us.

I know we can have a cup of coffee, Dion, and talk about Joan Collins, veganism, or "Oblivion" (I didn't like it, by the way), but there is no way a MT software seller (you) will see MT as a translator (me) does.

Kind regards,
Au
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Machine Translations: Should Proz.com advertise MT jobs?






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