The Robot Vs Translators

Do you remember the first time you took help from machine translations? How was your experience? Was it good? Well, no doubt that we’ve come a long way and now entire websites can be translated with the help of machine translation. But still, we cannot neglect the incredible talent of linguists who work to bring your brand experience to life.

On the contrary, human translations matter as much as machine translations. We all know that translation is an essential tool for communication between businesses. Especially, if you are a global company and you’re not taking advantage of translation, you’re missing out on potential business.

You will need basic services like offering your website in a different language or describing your product in a foreign language. It is important for the understanding of the international consumers. If you’re interested in knowing more about human translations, let’s discuss them in this blog!

By Definition

The term human translation highlights the fact that the translation is done by a human being instead of computers or machines. It is the oldest form that relies on the pure intelligence of human translators to convert one way of saying to another. And while human translation comes in many different flavors, it remains the most widely-used translation method to this day.

Services of Human Translation

Although, there are machines who can provide the same service human translation is still the best form of translating any written document, be it books, legal documents, manuals, product information, websites, personal documents, magazines, letters, and advertisements.

We agree that technology is making its way and covering the wider space. But still, most people trust human translation services.

The technology should be of use only as a support for humans. It should not inhibit the profession and working career of a linguist.

According to research, the findings indicate that humans can translate the meaning of a sentence more accurately than machine translators. To an extent, many other pieces of research support this fact.

In these translations, the human translators carry out all the processes involved in the translation of the written text.

Benefits of Human Translations

Since everyone considers human translations as the best option, let’s take a look at the benefit of getting human translation services.

Accuracy

The machine translations are often word-to-word translations. But in sentence structure, it is often necessary to understand the meaning of the sentence and then translate it accordingly. The best decision is to convey the better meaning. Interesting to note that, even professional translators will have different choices for terms and style.

Accuracy is not just technical. It is also an art that cannot be learned without decades of work behind a monitor.  Humans provide services based on rational and logical facts. This is why; they can provide a more accurate translation.

High Quality

The translations for the courts, business presentations, or any application requiring high-quality services should have human translation only. Here, we cannot also neglect the efficiency and great efforts of linguists to provide high-quality translations.

Humans are best when it comes to translating a document into its target languages. The customers feel happier when they get human translation rather than machine translation.

Subject Matter Expertise

Besides linguistic skills, translation companies look for subject matter expertise as well. It is because every field has its specific terminology that cannot be understood by every layman. So, for the best translation solutions, you should opt for such a company that employs subject matter experts. Subject matter experts know the specific terminologies of each field and provide affluent translation services that machine translation cannot do.

Creativity and Uniqueness

Machines can provide you with word-to-word translations but the beauty of human translation is exercising creativity. Language learners become experts after continuous practice and fierce dedication. Although you will get machine translations in a short time, it will lack the creativity and uniqueness of a human being.

There is nothing unique about programmed translations. Eventually, all translation text will look the same making it difficult for companies to establish unique brands. Lack of creativity can also lead to dull texts.

Cultural Relevance

Each country has norms and values that highlight its culture. Only humans will have the ability to add cultural elements to the translations. In the translation process, it is very important to consider cultural nuance.

Otherwise, the translation will fire back. If the human translator is not aware of the culture of the people that speak the language then it becomes very offensive in dealing with them. This is why; you should only hire a native human translator to avoid cultural and regional relevance problems.

The Robot Vs. Translators

The long-running debate of the robot vs. translators refuses to go away. There has been a lot of discussion and bold claims about whether or not machine translation will make human translation obsolete. Both sides have strong arguments.

There are approximately 6,500 spoken languages in this world, each with different dialects, cultural influences, alphabets, grammatical rules, and many other nuances that make the variables of translation innumerable.

Linguists and programmers have the responsibility of not only identifying all of these variables but also quantifying them into usable data for machine translation algorithms.

It certainly seems like an impossible feat.

Translating tone and style

Conveying the proper tone in the translation project is very difficult. But the translation needs to be complete and accurate. Translation software is designed to replace the provided words with the most commonly used vocabulary. The problem is, using the same common vocabulary will not best suit the text.

For example, there is a tonal difference between synonyms like ‘angry’ and ‘annoyed’ and ‘excited’ or ‘agitated’. Machines do not yet know how to discern between these nuances and maybe never will, which may be the biggest defining difference between both translations.

Translating words with multiple meanings

Many words have multiple meanings depending on the context they are used. Whereas humans can naturally infer which meaning of a word is being referenced based on the topic and words around it, computers struggle to do the same.

One word can have great varying definitions. The professional translation service of a human translator is an expert in this work but the Google translator and other machine translations find it hard to do the same work.

Cost and Speed

Machine translation hits that sweet spot of cost and speed, offering a really quick way for brands to translate their documents at scale without much overhead. But, that doesn’t mean it’s always applicable. Meanwhile, professional, human translation is great for those projects that require extra care and nuance.

Talented translators work on your brand’s content to capture the original meaning and convey that feeling or message essentially in a new body of work.

Pros and Cons of Machine Translation

In favor of machine translation, automation and artificial intelligence continue to grow and become integral parts of how translation evolves. Moreover, they cost less, and maintaining a budget is the top priority. But on the downside, automation can never replace human translators and their ability to investigate. Furthermore, machine translations may not be adequate for the high-priority content.

Pros and Cons of Human Translation

In favor of human translation, humans can understand the intricacies of linguistics and can implement their own experiences and gut feelings to do the job well. You can also collaborate with professional translators. But on the downside, human translations are more resource-intensive. They are a bit costly and require more time for efficient work. But one thing is to be for sure that they are high-quality translations.