The language services sector is constantly changing. Over the years, translators have witnessed how their profession has adapted to new technological developments, allowing them to offer new services and work with tools providing increased comfort and precision. Times change, and so do needs. This new globalization need requires constant internationalization and interlinuguistic communication tasks, usually within short and urgent deadlines. As a result, new technologies have been developed that make it possible to do translations much quicker and more swiftly. This is partly down to translation softwares, which come with ever increasing functions that allow us to translate more easily, with greater certainty and even create resources for future projects. Arguably, one of the additions that has revolutionized the translation industry the most is automatic translation.
For quite some time now, work has taken place on the instant generation of raw translations. Smart translation engines that, decades ago, produced disjointed, imprecise and laughable translations now provide more complex matches thanks to search processes within an extensive translation corpus. As a result, this resource has found its place in language services as many clients simply require a gist translation of a text in order to understand the general idea of its content. Although the resulting products do not comply with certain quality standards, it is possible to use them for private purposes that are neither commercial or official. This has transformed it into an additional tool within the catalogue of services provided by translation agencies and freelance professionals. However, automatic translation can also be used as a resource for official, commercial and informational translations. This requires the involvement of a human resource who is responsible for the post-editing. Here, the language professional compares the automatically-generated translation and the original document in order to detect and correct errors that jeopardize its quality according to a series of parameters.
This service entails a lower cost for the client and the human element ensures that they will still receive a quality product. This has led to a tendency for clients to request post-editing services, where appropriate, which is a source of worry for many translators who see their survival in the sector threatened. As is usually the case, innovation always brings with it both advantages and disadvantages. In this article, we aim to summarize them from the point of view of the translator, who must know exactly how to use this resource to their benefit and where they may encounter challenges.
Without a doubt, post-editing an automatic translation is an additional language service that we can incorporate into our portfolio. Detecting this new need and having suitable training in order to be able to provide it allows us to access new clients and also offer it to current clients, who will look favorably on the availability of services that adapt to their needs, budgets and general circumstances. This attention shows professionalism and an eagerness to remain abreast of all the advances in the sector. Specifically, post-editing is a very useful resource for translating very long texts, which tend to contain very technical terminology, repetitions and syntactic structures that are easy for the translation engine to detect. This will allow us to work more quickly through our assigned jobs. It is usually thought that a translator can translate an average of 2000-3000 words in a day (depending on the field of specialty and the type of text), but with post-editing an automatic translation, it is estimated that about 5000 words can be translated in a day. Therefore, if a translator learns how to strategically post-edit, they can optimize work times. Generally, in post-editing, the focus is mainly on accuracy and grammar, rather than writing, which means that a translator will tend to first solve errors related to terminology consistency, accuracy of the translation and the overall grammar of the text. Occasionally, clients requiring post-editing do not have the same needs as those requiring a translation, so the translator must be aware of the circumstances of each case. Essentially, the translator must take into account that post-editing makes it possible for automatic translation and sector professionals to coexist, since the end quality of a product is impossible without the involvement of the latter.
However, post-editing affects translators in that it is a cheaper service. Clearly, this means a loss in earnings that, in principle, should be compensated by the ease-of-use associated with this task and the reduction in labor. At times, this ease-of-use is affected by another negative aspect; not all automatic translation engines are equally good. Translation engines often provide results that do not fall within the field of specialty, contain grammar and spelling errors, or contain numerous inconsistencies. Detecting and correcting all of them can unpredictably lengthen the translator’s work, which would not be the case if they had started the translation from scratch. In addition, and this is both an advantage and a disadvantage, post-editing cannot be applied to all types of text since there are tasks and formats that require prior or subsequent work usually performed by a professional linguist. These include video and audio time synchronization or the transcription of hand-written documents.
As a result, we can safely say that post-editing is a language service that is here to stay, and it provides a series of advantages for both clients and translators. It is also important to note that translators should breathe easy knowing that a coexistence between the two is necessary in order to make the most of this resource.
Ref. de la imagen: https://www.thetradenews.com/human-judgement-still-king-in-a-world-of-algorithmic-trades/vector-of-a-man-working-with-a-robot-sitting-at-table/
