Seven predictions and a survey presented at the 19th FIT Conference, San Francisco, August 2011
Translators in the 21st century find themselves in a difficult
position.On the one hand there is a steadily growing demand for
translation as a result of increasing global trade and communication
generally. On the other hand it becomes harder and harder for the
professional translator to meet this demand. Delivery times grow shorter
and prices go down.
Technology is often thought of as an answer to this kind of pressure.
But along with the technology come many new challenges. It is simply
impossible for a translator who is trained in the language arts to keep
up with the technology. And if she tries, frustration grows when she
finds out that translation tools do not really work together very well.
(See report
Individual translators and data exchange standards.)
Then there are the economics. As the owner of a small business,
translators must weigh the return-on-investment on time and money very
carefully. Tools do not come for free and every new tool takes time to
be mastered. What if these same tools – or machine translation – one day
take over the job of human translators, as many of our colleagues fear.
You might prefer to live on another planet, or at least work in another
profession.
For the 19th FIT Conference held in San Francisco, 1-4 August 2011,
TAUS ran a survey among the translators attending the conference. This
article references a summary of the survey, and then makes seven
predictions as a follow up to the keynote I gave to close the FIT event.
The conclusion: the future for translators looks bright, but they will
have to reinvent the profession first.
Crisis. What crisis?
In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, sixty-four (37%) of
the survey respondents reported that translation rates continue to be
under pressure. There seems to be a slight decline in translation
volume, while the palette of languages seems to be broadening slightly.
Thirty-seven respondents (21%) see business continuing as usual, while
respectively 12% and 10% of them see opportunities for automation and
innovation in the currently unstable market.
Which of the following technologies and/or innovations will
translators apply in the coming two years? Sixty percent of the
respondents say ‘no’ to machine translation, while 19% are already using
it, and 21% expect they will use MT within the next two years. The main
concerns about MT are the poor quality of MT output (76%) and the poor
quality of source documents (54%). Those who look at MT on the bright
side see cost reduction as the greatest benefit (39%) and the
possibility of real-time delivery of translation as a secondary benefit
(35%).
A majority of the respondents are interested in sharing translation
memories and terminology: 35% already do so and 39% expect to be sharing
language data within two years. However, another much larger poll by
ProZ.com of 1,000 translators indicates that 49% would not consider
sharing their translation memories. Translators are concerned about
ownership of TMs and their relevance to the job at hand. But they do see
the benefits of terminology searches of massive TM resources and the
productivity gains these bring.
Click here for a summary of the full survey.
The future looks bright, but …
… change is the name of the game. And reinventing the profession is
extremely hard if your days are spent just getting the jobs done and
trying to make a modest living. Yet, for the first time in the history
of the planet, translation is a really strategic activity. Thanks to
Google Translate, Yahoo! Babelfish and Microsoft Bing, every soul on our
planet now knows what translation means.
Hundreds of millions people press the translate button every day
which makes them realize how difficult it is to get a good, accurate
translation. As professionals we must realize that our community is far
too small (just 250,000 or so professional translators in a world of
6,000 languages?) to serve the needs of seven billion citizens.
We are only scratching the surface. As professional translators – and
as a global translation industry – our mission is to help the world
communicate better. (That sounds better than being a lawyer or a banker,
right?) For we now have the means to deliver on that mission. We simply
need to find a way to do it properly. Here is how TAUS sees the future
in seven predictions.
1. MT is here to stay
Let’s face it: machine translation will never be perfect. Every
speaker of a language has the right to introduce new words, give
existing words new meanings and change the spelling and grammar of his
language. The point is: that’s what people do every day – witness
Twitter or online chat, popular songs or political revolutions.
Computers just cannot keep up with these evolving nuances and
associations in hundreds of domains and linguaspheres created by
speakers of just one language. Yet, MT for all its mechanical faults is
here to stay. Why? For the simple reason that we humans just cannot
deliver enough translations in real-time.
Two other factors will also influence the rapid growth of MT. First,
MT is getting better and better as we keep feeding the engines with
human translated sentences to improve their domain knowledge and we keep
tweaking the rules to improve the word order and forms. Second, a new
generation of users are growing up, they are more forgiving, and open to
self-service. Users may even step in and offer better terminology and
forms of expression as a way to help others and themselves.
MT is here to stay and will be called “translation”. It will be
embedded on every website, mobile and car app. Translation will become a
utility, just like electricity, water and Internet: a basic resource
and a basic human right.
2. High-quality translation will gain recognition
As machine translation becomes so universally available, it is clear
that there isn’t just one single translation of a text that fits all. To
differentiate their product offerings and appeal to specific customer
groups, buyers will recognize the need for high-quality translation -
call it personalization, transcreation or hyper-localization. This means
that, machines will not replace human translators.
On the contrary, non-perfect MT output will stimulate the need for
high-quality translation in a broad range of communication situations.
The challenge we face as an industry is to agree on the criteria and the
measurements for the level of quality that is needed for each
situation. Sometimes MT is simply not an option. Sometimes MT is the
only option.
3. Post-editing will come and go
Information travels fast and loses its value quickly. This is
especially true for news, entertainment, online shopping and customer
support content, but increasingly also for business-to-business and
government information.
There is a fundamental shift from static “cast in stone” content to
dynamic “on the fly” content. Instead of one or two releases per year,
companies are shipping product updates on a weekly if not daily basis.
And consumers, citizens and patients are increasingly sharing their
reviews, tips and tricks in user blogs and social media in almost real
time. Any chunk of information may be relevant and interesting to
someone somewhere.
The key attraction of MT in this new information age is that it can
deliver real-time translation to meet these changes. Potential cost
reduction is only a secondary benefit. And the widespread fear that all
human translators will soon be downgraded to mere post-editors of MT
output is ungrounded.
Why? Well, in the next few years post-editing will grow quickly, but
then we will see it diminish. But if there is no time for translation,
then there is time for post-editing either. Real-time is real-time,
right? In any case, MT technology will get better, using machine
intelligence to learn from its mistakes and not make them again.
Translators who choose to work with computers will customize and
personalize MT engines to specific tasks, customers and domains, rather
than do stupid, repetitive error fixing. They will be promoted to
‘language quality advisors’ if you like.
4. Translators win when supply chains get shorter
More so than most other industries, the translation industry consists
of a complex cascade of suppliers. There may be three or four levels
between the translator and the end-user: translation agency, global
multi-language vendor, corporate translation department and often an
external quality reviewer or subject matter expert.
All these functions add a cost to translation but are they adding any
real value in proportion to that cost? Tasks are often replicated and
functions overlap. Disintermediation (i.e., ‘cutting out the middleman’)
hasn’t really bitten into the translation industry yet as it has in the
travel and banking industries, for example. But change is on the way,
under pressure from the overarching need to translate more words into
more languages.
Corporate and government buyers will analyze their supply chains to
reduce their costs, and functions such as project management, quality
assurance, vendor selection and translation memory management, will
probably be streamlined, simplified or shared. Yet there will be no
question about the critical role of the translator at the end of the
chain.
Even though MT will be used to translate content streams requiring
real-time translation, there will always be a need for a professional
translator to tell good from bad language in the communication process.
5. The list of languages keeps growing
As global business is shifting from an export mentality to a world of
open trading on a flat playing field, the nature of publishing and
communications is also changing fundamentally.
In the old 20th century model the global manufacturer and publisher
used to push information out to the world. They would select their
markets, pick their most important language communities and translate
their own instructions for use, brochures and web pages.
They would probably start with four to six languages and gradually
add more languages if the markets prove to be worthwhile. In the new
21st century model, companies are realizing that their customers are not
sitting there waiting for the information to be pushed out by
manufacturers and publishers.
They are browsing the Internet and pulling down information wherever
they find it. And if they can’t find it, they write their own reviews
and comments that yet others may then translate to help their local
peers. In the old world, content was owned by publishers; in the new
world content is shared and earned.
In this radically changing environment, the range of languages for
content is constantly growing. Successful global companies need to
facilitate communications in a hundred-or more languages instead of the
old standard set of seven or at the most twenty.
Translators in many more countries will benefit from this “democratization” of globalization.
6. Sharing data becomes the norm
Our concept of a ‘translation memory’ is about to change. Translation
memories and translation memory tools have long been cultivated as our
proprietary productivity weapon, perhaps offering a competitive edge in
an environment where one fifth of professional translators (according to
a recent ProZ.om poll) still don’t even use translation memories.
Yet, we have now reached the limits of potential productivity gains,
and, let’s face it, translation memory technology itself – in its
current and mostly used form – is no longer state-of-the-art. Most
translation memory tools are stuck in a technology time warp and cannot
leverage the power of corpus linguistics (see article
The Future is Corpus Linguistics).
A new generation of translation productivity tools will emerge that
allow us to leverage any length of strings of text from very large
corpora of translations.
These new tools will in many respects be using features and
components that emerged from statistical MT technology, except for the
fact that they leave the professional translator in full control of the
processes. They will unleash the translational power hidden inside very
large corpora of text. They will allow us to do semantic searches and
clustering, synonym identification, automatic cleaning and correction of
language data, sentiment analyses and predictive translations.
In anticipation of this next generation translation technology, many
translators and companies have already started consolidating their
translation memory data into large, searchable repositories. Some (more
than you think) are even harvesting these language data from the
Internet, meaning that they have computers crawling translated web
sites, aligning the sentences from these web sites, and reconstructing
translation memory files.
Call them pirates if you like. But as we have seen in other
industries, they are the drivers of innovation. We at TAUS truly believe
that it is this kind of innovation that is needed to unleash the power
of the translation industry and enable it to prosper.
The TAUS Data Association was established in 2008 as a legal,
not-for-profit member-driven organization aimed at hosting and sharing
translation memories for all stakeholders in the global translation
industry. The publicly accessible and searchable database already
contains four billion words of high-quality translation data in 350-plus
language pairs.
7. Translation becomes a business of choices
The future of translation either looks bright or gloomy: it depends
on whether you want to change, reinvent yourself and adapt. Admittedly,
this is not an easy choice. Nor is there a lot of time to consider all
the options, but at least translators now have the luxury of choosing.
In the past, you became a translator and you were in it for life. Unless
of course you became a literary translator, in which case none of the
above applies.
Today, you can choose to be a ‘boutique’ translator, specializing in a
domain and providing hyper-localization or transcreation services. In
this case, you will drift away from the original concept of a translator
once you start specializing in your domain. You may be asked to create
local content instead of translating text written for a different
culture.
You may be asked to do brand checking for new product names. Your job
title may change to ‘language consultant’ or ‘communications adviser’.
If what you like is linguistics and computers, you may choose to become a
specialist in training domain- and customer-specific MT engines, or in
translation optimization, or in new functions such as language data
cleaning, data selection on the basis of semantic search, search engine
optimization, or sentiment and cultural analysis using customer feedback
data.
The availability of language data in so many languages will open a
much larger range of choices for specialization and innovation. And yes,
you can also opt for post-editing machine translation output. Not so
much fun if it is not your first choice, but in many ways this option is
similar to the first wave of automation our profession experienced in
the 1980s with the arrival of translation memory tools.
The good news now, is that the MT engines will soon learn from the
corrections made by post-editors, so you will not have to make the same
corrections again and again. And translators (or whatever their new
title might be) will become much less solitary and grow closer to their
colleagues and end customers.
Collaborative networks will bring language workers together. And
buyers of translation and language-related services will eliminate one
or two handovers in the supply chain and be able to connect directly
with you.
Translation may, in many ways, become a commodity and a utility but
that does not spell the end of the profession. On the contrary, it will
stimulate the need for differentiation, specialization and value added
services. It is up to the world’s translators to rise to the challenge,
and open up to these changes, and reinvent their future. Source: http://www.translationautomation.com
When interpreting do not veer from literal translations. In some
contexts translating what has been said subjectively may be appropriate
but in a legal environment everything must be translated even if it very
uncomfortable to do so.
Posts
