Machine Translation is Changing the Game, Not Ending It

As a translation business owner, I come across a lot of industry colleagues who fear Google's machine translation initiative.

It's a natural, but unfounded, response.

Our business thrives on cross-border commerce. A great translation tool — whether Google’s or another — will lower the barrier to communication across borders. This should be good for individuals and business while preserving language diversity as a key ingredient to multiculturalism.

Machine translation tools today can inexpensively produce draft translations that (while often inaccurate and sometimes humorous) are useful for personal and even business communication.

Still, the value that B2B translation service firms provide to businesses goes well beyond this basic draft-quality output. Companies hire translation professionals for many reasons that will not go away anytime soon.

Some examples include:

• Marketing communications where brands are at stake will require refined, nuanced translations.
• Content where misunderstandings or mistranslations would be costly require clear and accurate human translations.
• Proprietary and confidential content where ownership is critical is not suited for the Google site in particular — based on my (perhaps erroneous) understanding that they can reuse this content.

The limitations above notwithstanding, the translation service industry needs to embrace this change as it develops or risk being run over by it.

We work on multilingual communication projects where translation is only part of the solution — along with services such as language strategy, style guide development, project management, quality assurance, voice-overs, graphics and desktop production.

In the future, machine translation may well be the raw material that all service providers use as the basis for their service, before editing, proofing and other production services required to produce a final document.

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