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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

> that human translators may be an endangered species. In this scenario, human translators would become, within a few years, mere quality controllers and glitch fixers, rather than producers of fresh new text.

Huh? As someone who's worked in translation briefly before, that's already the case and has been for at least a decade -- at least for written material that's not "art" (literature, poetry).

It's far faster for professional translators to run something through Google Translate or similar and then clean it up, than type it out from scratch. And identical quality in the end.

There's little "soul-shattering" about this at all. Someone who needs to churn out translations of UN meeting notes day after day isn't doing it for their soul -- they're doing it because it's their job and people of different nationalities can find out what happened in the meeting to do their job.

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I'm a little surprised to learn that GT is used to translate UN meeting notes, because the right kind of mistake in that context can literally lead to a costly, possibly catastrophic, international incident.

Sorry, my experience was at professional translation companies -- I don't know about actual processes at the UN, was just using it as an illustration that translating isn't usually for "art".

But I don't see why it should be any different. It's still being cleaned up.

The translator knows what they want in the end so the result is the same whether they start with automatic translation or not.

Plus, where I worked all translations were always then reviewed by a second translator anyways, because people miss things too -- we're only human.

Automatic translation as a first step just speeds things up. It doesn't change the final quality at all.

That’s true...people are lazy and costs want to fall, but it’s a little disconcerting in areas that require nuance and detail.

I’m by no means a translator, but it isn’t difficult for me to find sentences where Google Translate simply butchers the nuance of Japanese/English conversions. Things like politeness and tone? Gone.

Maybe it’s better for closer language pairs, but if a professional translator starts with automated translations for an important document, they’re taking a huge risk. Even as an intermediate speaker, the things I am good at (concept understanding, idomatic speech, politeness, tone) are exactly the things that translation tools are bad at, and correcting the errors often just requires re-writing whole paragraphs from scratch.

Google Translate is spectacularly bad at Japanese/English. I received an email yesterday where someone who is visiting me said (in translation) that she was looking forward to eating "my rice" (proper translation: my food), which is such a basic thing I can't believe that Google still gets it wrong.

As a counter example, GT is surprisingly good at English to Russian translation: my sister’s husband knows no Russian, but is able to participate in family iMessage chats with no issues. Most of the time I can’t tell his messages have not been written by a native Russian speaker. He is able to fully participate in a written conversation. Mind boggling!

Definitely. Happens so often that I always warn new students off of using GT as a dictionary (which is a super common thing lately).

I use GT to figure out the most probable mapping for words and simple grammar points when there are multiple dictionary options, or to give me kanji readings. It still screws those up often enough that I don’t trust it.

That's why I said written texts. You're right, it's not up to the task for dialog.

And I'm not aware of automatic translation used professionally for dialog (e.g. movie subtitles) because you're right -- there it's primarily nuance and tone.

I’m talking about written text. Even for humdrum stuff like business emails, the lack of nuance and contextual understanding is crippling for JP/EN translation.

I actually had a start-up idea circa 2005 for translating business emails between Japanese and English. The idea (and please feel free to use it for whatever it's worth now) was to constrain the emails into the set phrases derived from MINNA NO NIHONGO, where you could only choose the sentence type and fill in the nouns and verbs.

eg: “Do you think <NOUN> will <VERB>?”

would be translated to: “<NOUN>は<VERB>でしょうか?”

and back in the other direction. The emails would be constructed from a sequences of various sentence types.

It would be a sort of highly constrained “business language”, but of course with a nice UI(!)

Ha, OK -- "prepared" written text maybe? "Formal" written text? I've never come across people paying for translating business emails. :)

I'm talking about the vast majority of what translating companies are paid to translate -- articles, contracts, reports, specifications, meeting summaries, and so on -- whatever you want to call that. Thanks for helping me to clarify.

The laziness is the main harm that Google translate creates. I wish they would just attach the translated words to the original sentence and let the translator assemble the correct version. Then when you see an odd goofball word you click on correct version (if possible) so that way the program might improve slowly. Off course the translator needs to know the grammar of the language itself and that you probably need to reassemble the sentence. You might not always get the grammar right but at least the meaning might be preserved.

It is also faster for professional programmers to run something through stack overflow and paste the top voted answer into their code.

Not being a translator I wonder how good of an analogy this is

Not a very good analogy since the translator knows the correct translation before hand and therefore can identify the incorrect translation produced, whereas someone using stack overflow does not know the correct answer before hand.

Its a little hazier than that. Someone using stack overflow might not know the exact answer (else why look) but may know enough to choose between answers and recognize the one most likely to solve their problem.

Not a translator, but a tri lingual person here. Often the decision what is a "correct" translation is not simple or unambiguous. As to the use of stack overflow, we all have our own experiences.

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