Machine translation

In the video you can hear Juliet Haydock, a translator with over thirty years of experience.

She mentions how professionals can take advantage of recent advances in machine translation for terminology research and shares her view on the future of machine and human translators.

Technology has had a huge impact on how translations are produced to meet tight deadlines and sufficient quality standards. One of the two main types of translation technology is machine translation (MT): programmes where you type text in one language and get a translation, such as Google Translate or Babylon.

The translations can be clumsy and wrong, even if for some language pairs and for simple, repetitive texts the quality has improved a lot. Given the industry focus on efficiency, the use of MT may be acceptable for some ‘quick and dirty’ internal tasks, where the gist matters.

• What are your views on machine translation?
• Will it ever replace human translators?