Machine Translation Response - Airi Hatori

 It was very interesting to see how machine translation was developed back in the 1950s. Although some flaws in machine translation are still present, it has definitely worked its way up to the human level. DeepL almost scares me because it translates very well, and even my coworker recommended that I use DeepL for my translation tasks. I believe that eventually, machine translation will replace translators' or interpreters' jobs; however, I believe that J-E translation will remain challenging for MT since you have to read into cultural context and different nuances that the Japanese language has. 

I think it would lift us translators' shoulders off some workload, but I still believe that translators are necessary to do a final check on the translated texts just to be sure of the quality of the work. I think that the pros of relying on MT are that it is fast and cost-efficient and that it has the ability to translate large volumes of content quickly and accurately. In terms of cost and time efficiency, I believe that companies like Verticle (Kodansha), where the guest speaker works at, can definitely use MT to speed up the translation process and that they wouldn't need a week to translate one episode of anime. 

Here are the translations of the last stanza of the poem called "雨ニモマケズ " that I was curious to see how the different MT would translate differently: 

Original：

日照りのときは涙を流し 

寒さの夏はオロオロ歩き 

皆にデクノボーと呼ばれ 

誉められもせず苦にもされず 

そういう者に 私はなりたい

Google Translation: 

Shedding tears when the sun is shining

Strolling around in the cold summer

Called Dekunobo by everyone

neither praised nor afflicted

i want to be that person

DeepL: 

When the sun shines, we weep 

In summer when it is cold 

Called dekunobo by everyone 

They don't praise me, they don't bother me 

That's the kind of person I want to be

Roger Pulvers ’s translation : 

He weeps at the time of drought

He plods about at a loss during the cold summer

Everybody calls him ‘Blockhead'

No one sings his praises

Or takes him to heart...

That is the sort of person

I want to be

I personally like Roger Pulver's translation the most because he translated dekunobo as a blockhead, and the last two sentences definitely flow better than the other two. I found a very interesting web page that explains thoroughly about how Pulver translated it and it is very interesting. Here is the link: https://blog.goo.ne.jp/sinanodaimon/e/c5bbbaa8f429ca6b836b1b69deb7989d