The translation and interpreting professions are no
doubt in a transition process; a transition stirred mostly by technology. We all know it. It is equally important, however, that we all know and acknowledge the
limitations of technological advances and the boundaries for the use of
technology-based tools.
I recently learned about an initiative put forth by
the Canadian government to provide all its employees with Portage
–an automatic translation software similar to Google Translate – developed by
the National Research
Council of Canada. Of course, for translators in Canada, this
may represent job losses and a decline of the quality of government
communication.
The Translation
Bureau – " the
federal organization responsible for supporting the Government of Canada in its
efforts to communicate with and provide services for Canadians in the official
language of their choice"– is
known as a provider of high quality services for which considerable
resources have been invested to develop an impressive array of language-related
services. This includes writing guidelines, articles, quizzes, linguistics
tools such as terminology standardization, glossaries in an array of fields,
and terminology databases –namely Termium,
which I consider to be one of the most reliable sources for terminological
research in English, French, and Spanish (although Spanish is not as exhaustive
as in English and French).
The Translation Bureau, however, has reportedly not been hiring new
translators and is counting on attrition to decrease the size of its staff. The
initiative of providing all federal employees with automatic translation software adds to the concerns
of current staff translators. A recent newspaper
article reports that a pilot with 200 federal employees
will assess the effectiveness of the translation software before it is launched
government-wide by 2016.

In a fast-paced world, translators face tight deadlines and
turnaround times. It is my hope that if the Canadian government pilot yields
positive outcomes, installing translation software on the desktops of federal
employees will mean that translators will be able to focus more on the
production of quality key documents that will translate –no pun intended– into higher
quality government communication. Automatically generated translation has its
place in the large scheme of things, but the intricacy and beauty of language
still outsmarts any statistical probability matching device. It remains, however, a story to be continued. In the meantime, let’s reserve machine
translation for settings such as social media and for other times where getting
the gist of a message suffices. But let’s
continue to educate and prepare the best qualified translators and
interpreters.
Machine translation that is very common all over the world. Machine translator has required a less time of human translator. Even embassies have used the machine translation for translation of documents.
ReplyDelete