“Translation presents not merely a paradigm, but the utmost case of engaged literary interpretation.” Although this quote from John Felstiner (Professor Emeritus of English at Stanford University) is mainly oriented towards Literary Translation, and today’s arena of Language Translation Services covers a wide range of other sectors such as Technical, Financial, Commercial, Scientific, Medical, Chemical and Legal Translation, it still provides substantial food for thought in the comparison between machine and human translation, which has time and again been a matter of debate.
A general overview of machine translation portrays a number of advantages, namely time efficiency, cost efficiency, confidentiality and scope of languages. Definitely, when you make use of any translation software, you invariably end up saving time and money (both of which you would otherwise have to invest on a professional translator). Besides, you can be rest assured that the confidentiality of your information remains unaffected and you will be provided a wide range of languages to choose from, to fulfill all your multilingual translation requirements. However you need to delve a little deeper to understand that a machine is after all a machine and its convenience is paired with several shortcomings, the first of which is the exact word-to-word translation procedure employed. Considering business translation as an example, as the CEO of your company, if you are intending to expand overseas, you need to reach out to prospective clients across multilingual platforms and communicate with them appropriately, clearly and effectively. No translation software can be entrusted to execute this assignment successfully because the machine will not understand the political, social, economic and cultural background of the end-user to execute context-specific translations that are socially and culturally appropriate in the particular state or country. Another major problem lies in the structure and systematic guidelines regulating mechanical translation, which fails to detect ambiguities, idioms, specific phrases etc in the text and make appropriate changes instead of translating by the word. Besides, in case of highly domain-specific technical translation, the software often fails to translate certain technical information appropriately, which can be effectively translated only by professional translators who have field-specific expertise. Especially when someone using a translation software is completely unaware of the intended language of translation and has no way of cross-checking the same, the results are often catastrophic and sometimes hilarious. For example, in China, one would find several restaurant menus that have “Stir fried Wikipedia” and “Translate Server Error” listed in them. Since these low and mid-scale restaurant owners have no means of cross checking the machine churned output, such major errors get printed on their menus and become a major source of amusement to foreigners.
All said and done, one cannot completely ward off or ridicule computer aided translation owing to the fact that it serves as excellent secondary aids for human translation, but at the same time, it is impossible for any machine aided translation to match the sheer finesse and subtle detailing of human translation, let alone replacing the latter altogether.
