I see a lot of people online use machine translation to communicate with people of different languages, so machine translation is definitely useful—however, it is generally very easy to tell if someone is using translation software or not, especially if the text being translated is from a non-Roman language to English and vice versa. I highly disagree that translators will not be needed in the future or that translators of the future will be like “quality-control experts.” Words translated by translators will always sound more natural, and while translators can interpret meaning in text, machines can’t. Translators aren’t just looking at quality—that’s editors—they’re also creating the things that need the quality checks. Language is always evolving too. Words used today may be used differently in the future; new words may pop up; machine translation software will always be playing catch-up in addition to trying to train more on the current languages.
I have read (web)novels translated by groups who only use machine translation, groups who use machine translation and then manually edit, and groups who manually translate and edit from the source novel. And the quality is in that order too, from worst to best. The groups who manually translate and edit have the best translated novels; they try to make the puns and riddles work in English and it’s fun. Overall, the reading experience is smooth and enjoyable. The groups who machine translate and then manually edit have decent quality; some puns, jokes, names, culture specific things don’t get across and it’s ok since I usually know what they’re referring to since I know the source language. The reading experience is decent but lacking. The groups who machine translate—I don’t even finish. Sometimes I’d start reading and think everything is ok, decent enough, and then all of a sudden, the names or pronouns change, and the grammar becomes horrid and nothing makes sense anymore.
Machine translation isn’t bad though. It makes language more accessible, and I think more sophisticated machine translation software may be helpful to translators the way premade assets and models are to digital artists--simplifying the process. However, I think machine translation is better for more casual translations like short messages/grammatically correct sentences.
In addition, sometimes when people see the (machine) translated text, they will/may have preconceived notions of how the text should be translated and that way might not be the best way. So maybe machine translation will be a tool to aid translators or maybe machine translation will be a rock that trips up translators.
Original text:
#今年も残りわずかなのでお気に入りの4枚を貼る
The year is almost over so I’ll post my 4 favorite pieces
Maybe #2022Favorite4Artworks will work for this
Google Translate:
There are only a few left this year, so I'll put my favorite 4
DeepL:
I'll put up four of my favorites as there are only a few days left in the year
Both machine translations get the meaning across, though the Google Translate one may be confusing to readers; however the machine translated ones don’t translate well to an actual hashtag in English.
-Lesley
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