8 Reasons why Humans are better at Translation than Automated Translation Machines

Machine translation is although considered by the people relatively new, however, it has been there since the 1950s. It has witnessed many advancements over the years. Also, it has vastly improved. It has made the translation industry change like never before. Its efficiency, rapidness, and quality have made it something that a human cant be.

Moreover, it also helps in maintaining consistency in translation. Experts often boldly claim that more advancements and work may cause machine translations to replace human translators one day. However, this claim is kind of big and does not seem practical. It is important to understand how an automated translation machine works. The understanding helps to relate to the factors that tell how it is not possible for machine translation to replace human translation.

Machine translation and how it works

The engines of machine translations also known as (MT) are quite complex and these work with history and evolution. The technicians with the help of expert linguistics use algorithms, and coding-decoding to build the engines of these machines. A rule-based translation machine also called RBMT is a classical approach.

This approach is dependent on the linguistic information which is collected from source and target languages, dictionaries, and other grammar sources. Statistical machine translation replaced machine translation back in 1990. This version has the ability to analyze bilingual text and data.

It emerged as a step forward for the RBMT as the machines have the tendency to be well aware of the language rules on their own without relying on linguists for their help. SMT, however, is one machine model that is a traditional translation, and it is quite popular.

8 important reasons to prove human translators are better

As professionals and experts claim that machine translation can replace humans. There are people who are reckoned that it is not going to happen. Machines are not as proficient in languages as humans are. Machine translation always comes with errors and messages to rectify for many reasons.

Here are the important reasons that make it almost impossible

Content quality

A human translator creates a translation that is fluent, and natural, and it has the artistic interpretation that they create of the original content. Machine translation can not even reach that interpretation and the way human beings interpret it. Moreover, humans understand the essence and context of the content which requires translation.

Machine translation can not understand the essence. Moreover, human translators know about cultural and language differences, which helps in improving the content quality. A machine cannot take care of the native speakers’ common words, tone, and phrases. Besides that, machine translation is totally unaware of the texts, and it can not interpret text perfectly.

Language skills

The experience and expertise of the native translators are unmatchable. Experience and exposure to both languages help them to create a good translation to meet the requirements of the audience. There is no doubt about machine translation being cheaper and faster than human translation, however, it cannot ensure quality.

Neither, it can work on the connotation of a document. The natural and polished language skills and the original knack for writing talent and the conceptualization of the content cannot be possessed by machine translation.

Cultural sensitivity

Cultural aspects cannot be ignored in the translation. One of the crucial aspects while translating the content is cultural sensitivity. The norms and values vary with the cultures and regions. This is something that a machine translation can not interpret. During the translation of language from one source language to a target language, human translators can take care of various cultural norms.

As they understand the culture and values and can translate the content accordingly omitting the words and phrases that may offend the audience. As for automated machines they overlook cultural hints and that may lead to offense and spark controversy among the target audience.

Localization

Machine translation can barely differentiate between the different locales of a single language. French, for instance, is a language that has different dialects when spoken in France and Canadian French has a different vocabulary and dialects. The dialects of a single language have different versions in different regions. So, this hinders an effective localization process. A translation that is conducted by human beings can contribute to effective localization greatly.

Human touch

Artificial intelligence no matter how advanced and good can never match and replace human intelligence. The significance and essence that a human touch provides to make a translation fluent and worth reading cannot be integrated by the automated machine. It can only be grammatically good to go if it has proofreaders and editors to manage it further.

The translation can hardly be grammatically correct otherwise. The complexity and sentence structure can only be conceived by human translators, and they can only enhance the translation and its fluency.

Multiple meanings of single words

A number of languages have words that are used for different meanings every time. English, for instance, is a language that has a plethora of words that have the same spellings but are different in meanings. Now a machine translation can never interpret that which meaning has to be used even if it has all possible meanings of one word in its database.

A professional translator, only can pick the meaning as per the sentence structure and make the content precise. Machine translation can not decide it on its own and can pick the meaning randomly, which may not go with the flow and sentence structure.

A simple example of this is the word wind (flowing air) and another wind stands for (to turn).  So, these are human translators who have superiority in this case.

Human translators lead to cost-saving

Customers and many companies are of the view that how using computer software saves them big money. Money that otherwise could go into the drain in case of hiring human translators or language service providers. However, this is not right. Translation procedure from one language to the other is barely a single step of the whole translation process.

Whereas, due to the errors that come with machine translation, more revisions are required to make the content look grammatically good and error-free. This is obvious that machine translation can not perform these tasks of editing and proofreading and companies have to outsource the task to a team of translators or language service providers.

This then adds up and a lot of money could go in vain. Moreover, the machine translation also can not suggest project management or graphic design expenses, and it could be the next big issue.

Improper formatting

This is the biggest reason why automated machines can never surpass human translators. Content is required in particular formatting. The process of internationalization and localization that mainly requires translation also has its set and defined rules of the formatting. Human translators can always work according to the formatting, whereas machine translation cannot get a clue about the formatting and follow a particular pattern.

Working with a computer-aided translation tool cannot interpret if the final product can get adjusted in the allotted formatting pattern. This scenario can further lead to an unforeseen cost. Human translators can always work to cut these costs by working on the given formatting adjustments.

Conclusion

Human translators’ superiority over machine translation has become quite an old topic to argue now. Although artificial intelligence has taken over everywhere already, the ultimate fact is even the creator of AI is the human being. Hence, the important reasons that tell how human translators are always going to rule the field as compared to machine translation have been discussed for the readers.