TechGist05

In the many discussions by different parties in the professional translation world involving machine translation, we see a great deal of conflation and confusion because most people assume that all MT is equivalent and that any MT under discussion is largely identical in all aspects. Here is a slightly modified description of what conflation is from the Wikipedia. Conflation occurs when the identities of two or more implementations, concepts, or products, sharing some characteristics of one another, seem to be a single identity — the differences appear to become lost. [1] In logic , it is the practice of treating two distinct MT variants as if they were one, which produces errors or misunderstandings as a fusion of distinct subjects tends to obscure analysis of relationships which are emphasized by contrasts. However, there are many reasons to question this “all MT is the same” assumption, as there are in fact many variants of MT, and it is useful to have some general understanding...

While we see that MT technology adoption continues to grow, hopefully because of clearly demonstrated benefits and measured production efficiencies, we still see that the dialogue between the technology developers / business sponsors and translators/post-editors is often strained, and communications can often be dysfunctional and sometimes even hostile. While there is a growing volume of material on “how-to-use” the technology, much of this material is of questionable quality , there is still very little discussion about managing human factors around successful use of the technology. The growth of instant, do-it-yourself (DIY) tools only unleashes more low quality MT output into the world and there are translators who are expected to often edit (fix) very low quality MT output for a pittance. Getting good quality MT output requires real skill, expertise and preferably some considerable experience. The actual translator experience with “good MT” is not going to be so different from work...