Technology in Language Translation
Introduction
The world keeps on changing as each day passes. These changes have been able affect the way the people relate on different levels of their daily activity. With the discovery of ground breaking innovations such as fire, the wheel, penicillin, to mention but a few, man has been able to looks for a way to survive his existence. On top of etching for his continued existence, man has been able to come up with ways that would in effect transform the vast world into a global village. Thanks to technology, different persons as well as cultures are able to merge into one big community. However, whist technology, through its different venues has been able to connect billions of diverse humans across the globe; language has and remains a large barrier. Thus while the meeting of different cultures is inevitable and successful, language possess a challenge to a greater majority of the world people with a smaller percentage having to learn foreign languages for the purpose of communication (Jurin, 2007). Predicaments are often created in such cases where few individuals are able to muster as many different languages as possible and even so, no single individual is able to muster all languages in the world (van den Born & Peltokorpi, 2010).
Thanks to the internet, one of technologies best innovation, not only can people communicate across the globe, but also opportunities have been created across the globe. One of these opportunities is in the business fraternity where business owners get the opportunity to market and sell their products all over the world with the click of the button. However, while this is a grant idea, language still poses a great threat as is the case with the WOW organizers and their website. The site, being monolingual in nature means that only those able to read and understand English are able to access the services offered by the site. On the other language people that do not understand English would be in a fix.
The pros and cons of using Google translate
The ultimate advantage of using Google translate is the fact that not only is the translation fast but is will also be cost efficient to the WOW organizers. This is because it will charge them nothing for the service. The other main advantage is that Google Translate uses a statistical learning approach unlike a rules-based approach. The result is that many, but not all, translations are called from human translations already online. However, Google translates makes a lot of mistakes. This has been attributed to the fact that the engine runs on the data that is available on Google. This means that the more the language is used on the search engine the more likely one is to find the proper translation. Currently it is estimated that since its inception in 2006, Google translate supports over 60 languages, including several dialects, with about 12 alpha languages. And more research is being done every day to perfect the system and add more languages. The creators of the system believe that it is all in the data and the frequent use of languages in the system. With more examples of the language to analyze, the program will be able to produce better results, including common phrases and idioms, which are often the hardest to translate. Furthermore, due to the commonality of the work published in particular languages Google Translate’s quality varies from language pair to language pair (Aiken & Balan, 2011). In this case, while the system can find a usable gist for a say Spanish/English translation, the same would not be applicable for a Romanian or Danish translation. Google Translate doesn’t offer the user any form of quality control. The search giant’s massive market dominance leads user to implicitly trust its offerings. This means that the user has to trust that the word being translated is the right one. In fact, unless there is a person to correct the translation, then it may end; he massage may end up coming out all wrong. In this case while adopting the Tamaki website strategy may be disadvantageous for they will have to blindly trust the translation being provided by Google translate. This may work or backfire on their faces (Hu et al., 2010).
Thus, the WOW organizers cannot simply rely on the Google translate mechanism to translate their websites into all the languages that they need for their website for while the translation may work out for some of the commonly translated language whose data is plenty in the system, the same may not be applicable for minority used languages.
The pros and cons of hiring professional translators
The organizers decided to engage professional translators. Unlike the previous idea, this may end up being on the higher end when it comes to costing. This is because the company would have to look for a specific translator for the different languages. The greatest advantage of utilizing a translator instead of Google is the accuracy part of the translation. While this translation will not be 100% accurate it will be closest to the meaning that Google. This is because the translator has been able to interact with that particular language and is able to place a larger percentage of the words thus Human translators have the specialty of translating important documents in native language which is a plentiful advantage for business entities to cope up language barrier. Professional human translators easily adopt the proper native phrasing of sentences, specific style of a particular language (Steiner, 2013). A good case example is when Korean airlines used the term ‘primitive energy’ in a promotional ad campaign for their flights to Kenya which caused uproar of massive proportions. This very trait allows the document to be presented as a well written document rather than just a translation page.
Human translators are also advantageous as they have complete understanding of the subject thus a translation from them would necessitate that they word the work according to the subject matter. Thus the human will make sure that result is a document that is not only readable but also makes sense. This can be observed in the Patagonia Turística website where the massage seems to be passed across regardless of whether the translation is in English, Chinese or Portuguese.
Google translate will in most cases translate the document or in this case the website in a strict literal meaning. This would mean that the result would lack creativity if not confuse the reader. If possible a professional human translator would in essence sometimes with hold the whole word or sentence and replace it with a word that would not only make more sense but would also be creative enough (Cole et.al,1995).
However, there is are disadvantages that comes with using Google translate that is not with human translators. One of the major disadvantages is duplicity. Google can easily read a translated page, compare it in English, and find that it's a mirrored duplicate. On the other hand, humans may reduce the chances of duplicity but not completely eradicate them. Also, when it comes to design and layout of the content, most translators won't consider usability of that page to the target languages market. It's not their fault though; translators prefer that one provides them the translatable material in text format. Rarely do they ever see the URL of the site, and even if they did, it would be for translation reference only.
Conclusion
Human translators and Google translate both have their strong and weak points. In this case, the website would have a better advantage if they engaged both mechanisms in the betterment of their website. This would ensure that the accuracy of the specific translations is better placed than if they were to use one and leave the other. This is referred to as the human technical translation.
In this case, the company would bring in the human translators whom though costly would bring in real meaning to the translation given the fact that they would properly interpret the needs of their clients. The advantage would be in the fact that this translators would be allowed to use Google translates where possible. Given the fact that Google translate is free, the only cost spend would be in paying the human translators. To be able to save on other costs, the company could only hire human translators for languages whose translation is harder for Google translate to deduce. While this type of translation will not be faster than the machine translation it will be efficient and reliable. With this type of translation, even cultural aspects of particular languages are not lost in the translation due to the combination of the two.
Thus, using the human technical translation method for the WOW website, though time constraining will end up saving the company in ensuring that the languages produced for the site are not only professional but also accurate ensuring the web-sites provides maximum exposure for the company.
References
Aiken, M., & Balan, S. (2011). An analysis of Google Translate accuracy. Translation Journal, 16(2).
Hu, C., Bederson, B. B., & Resnik, P. (2010, May). Translation by iterative collaboration between monolingual users. In Proceedings of Graphics Interface 2010 (pp. 39-46). Canadian Information Processing Society.
Steiner, G. (2013). After Babel: Aspects of language and translation. Open Road Media.
Cole, R. A., Mariani, J., Uszkoreit, H., Zaenen, A., Varile, G., Zampolli, A., ... & Zue, V. (1995). Survey of the state of the art in human language technology.
Jurin, S. (2007). The Future of Languages for Special Purposes in the Era of Progressing Management. Tourism And Hospitality Management, 13(3), 711-724.
van den Born, F., & Peltokorpi, V. (2010). LANGUAGE POLICIES AND COMMUNICATION IN MULTINATIONAL COMPANIES. Journal Of Business Communication, 47(2), 97-118.
http://www.patagonia.gov.ar/espanol/
http://travel.usatoday.com/flights/post/2012/06/korean-air-primitive/718396/1
