When Can I Use Machine Translation for Websites?
When Can I Use Machine Translation for Websites?
The answer to that question about machine translation for websites is pretty simple. When you have a website that needs to be read by people who do not understand English, you get it translated by machine translation systems (MT). This brings about significant cost savings and you don’t have to wait weeks to get your website translated. Let’s explore the pros and cons of translating websites with MT.
There is a growing population of internet users in third world and emerging economies that continue to be underserved and want information in their own languages
One of the many reasons why people choose to translate their websites with machine translation systems is that it costs almost nothing to convert a website’s text into 1 or more languages. Notice the word ‘almost’ in the previous sentence Machines are good at translating easy and straight-forward content. While the progress in the world of machine language processing is significant, it is still far from the science fiction version that we have come to expect. Let’s learn more about when and how to use machine translation services to get your websites and translated and when to actually avoid them.
Advantages of Translating Websites with Machine Translation
Computers are faster than humans and only limited by the processing power, bandwidth and network speeds through which they communicate with other computers and humans. Humans on the other hand are good at being accurate and doing things the way that make sense, which means they spend more time researching and processing. If your website has to deal with time-critical content that is acceptable by your audience with a degree of subpar content (e.g. 10% of the sentences may sound funny or not fluent) then machine translation is perhaps the right solution for you.
Machine translation services come in all kinds of flavors. The raw machine translation output is generated from past translated content as well as the rules and filters fed to it by the administrators. For example, a particular client may want to use MT for translating information about hotels, in which case they can provide a date and time format for the machine to adhere to, names of hotels, cities, places etc. to remain untranslated and so forth. The machine translation engine (the computer actually doing the translation) has an algorithm to learn from translations it performs over time. As such the computer gains proficiency and the quality increases as the volume of translation grows. This is the machine translation engine training.
There are other applications of machine translation where using the raw MT output will be unacceptable. In such a scenario, a professional human translator is hired to clean up the output of the raw MT. This process is known as MT Post-Editing. Depending on the stage in the cycle of the translation process, it could be an extremely daunting task for the professional translator or in case the machine has processed large volumes of translation in the past, it could be very easy to edit and clean up the output of the raw MT.
Examples of situations when you may want to use machine translation services for your website will be when you require translation of low priority content such as emails, social media posts, knowledge base etc.
Problems Associated with Machine Translation for Websites
As discussed earlier, machine translation improves speed but it takes effort on the part of the administrator to train the engine, maintain it and ensure SLAs are met. The client will also need to understand that it is incremental process and quality will only improve depending on how the machine is trained and how much feedback gets back to the system. Computers are machines and do not respond to human emotions and as such as the translated text may appear dry and sometimes unusable. It is particularly true for raw MT output where about 10% of the translated content may require heavy human intervention before it can be used.
Conclusion
Machine translation can be of great value to clients in the time-critical sectors such as hospitality, media and entertainment, resulting in savings in both time and money. But MT can also be expensive as there is an upfront investment in training the MT engine, improve quality and maintain the system.
We help companies and government agencies of all sizes communicate with their audiences in their local languages and provide professional translation of rare languages. Contact us today to learn more or to discuss your situation with us.
We help companies and government agencies of all sizes communicate with their audiences in their local languages and provide professional translation of rare languages. Contact us today to learn more or to discuss your situation with us.
