Machine Translation Response

I agree with the general consensus that machine translation is convenient and beneficial for people who don’t know the other language and want to translate it into a familiar language. Jaap van der Meer argued that “for many applications less-than-perfect translation will be good enough.” While I don’t agree with his argument that the future doesn’t need translators, I can agree a bit with the statement that nonperfect translation will be good enough, for certain scenarios. For example, Skeb’s translation from the client’s language (often English) into Japanese is not perfect, but it gets the point across to the artist. However, there are cases where the machine translation completely messes up the content of the message and because of that, the artist draws something completely different than what the client asked for. In this case, neither the client nor the artist can be blamed.  

I don’t think human translators can be replaced and I don’t think the quality of machine translation will improve to the point it can replace human translation. With machine translation, you exchange quality for speed, but if the quality is poor, what is the point of speed? I read translated webnovels and it is very obvious when something has been machine translated – the grammar, vocabulary, and sentence structure are all botched up. The really bad machine translations with little to no human editing is terrible and confusing to read, which makes me wonder why someone would spend the time to release these machine translations.

Occasionally I throw the original webnovel into a translator myself to read it fast, because I can read the translated English faster than reading the original, and interestingly, the machine translations I get is sometimes better than the machine translations released by certain translation groups, but I do still get headaches from trying to “translate” from the machine translation to something understandable. There are machine translations that have been edited translators familiar with both languages, and I think this is fine because it speeds up the translation process, but human translations or human involvement in translations ultimately provide a more enjoyable experience than machine translations.

Machine translation has a lot of benefits! I use Google Translate all the time to translate the tweets of people I follow on Twitter, but I always take it with a grain of salt because the translation is not the best. 

An amusing example of machine translation from English to Japanese with DeepL on Skeb: It is pretty accurate but DeepL included extra emojis, which is funny. 

 

Original Tweet:

毎日投稿100日超えたいと思ってるのでぜひインスタフォローして毎日の楽しみにしてください…

Google Translate:

I want to post more than 100 days every day, so please follow me on Instagram and look forward to every day...

DeepL:

I'm hoping to exceed 100 days of posting every day, so please follow my instagram and look forward to it every day...

My translation:

I want to exceed the 100day challenge, so definitely follow my insta for daily posts! please look forward to it~  

I took a lot of creative liberty with this to make it more internet friendly(?) and casual. 毎日投稿100日 refers to the 100 day challenge for posting art daily for 100 days, so I wanted to reference that as the “100 day challenge” instead of a literal translation.

Tiffany