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Machine translation has come a long way in the past few years. The growth and rise of technology has increased the reliability and credibility of machine translation. With companies like Google leading the charge, machine translations are at a new level of sophistication.
Earlier this year, Google announced its new version of Google Translate, which now offers 27 different languages for its visual translation service. A few years ago, visual translation was just a dream. It’s a big achievement for those in the translation business. With the continued improvement of technology, machine translation will continue to improve.
While it has improved greatly, machine translation is not yet to the point that it should be used exclusively. The day may never come when machine translation can take over the translation industry. That’s because machine translators are unable to deal adequately with one thing: meaning.
Machine translators, like Google Translate, don’t have the deep language understanding that it takes to translate extensive documents and text. These types of programs are great for minor text, or for use while traveling. Being able to speak into your phone, and have it speak your text in another language is a big step from tourists carrying around translation dictionaries. But while Google Translate can get you through your next vacation, it probably shouldn’t be trusted with your next business document.
The meaning should be the most important thing to consider with translation. Unfortunately, machine translations don’t have the ability to detect nuance. They can’t look into the cultural meaning of words, which is needed to truly understand what is being communicated. For that, you are going to need a human who can immerse themselves in both languages at hand and get a deep understanding of what they are translating.
Businesses should be especially careful with translation. It is easy to offend someone from a different culture when you don’t understand their traditions and customs. By not using a trusted translator, you have no idea what you are actually saying to those who speak a language you do not.
The future of translation is bright. There have definitely been huge advancements made in the past few years and, with the growth of technology, it is promising that machine translation will continue to grow and improve. With that being said, it is going to be hard for machine translation to overtake human translation. Skilled human translators have the linguistic and cultural understanding that is difficult to replicate with machines. For that reason, it is hard to imagine a day when human translators lose their jobs to machines.
