Updated: 14 January 2015
Today SDL is all about SDL Language Cloud and not BeGlobal, but I hope the article is still as relevant today. There are more ways to look at how you use Machine Translation so if you’re
Updated: 14 January 2015
Today SDL is all about SDL Language Cloud and not BeGlobal, but I hope the article is still as relevant today. There are more ways to look at how you use Machine Translation so if you’re interested take a look at these two more recent articles as well.
The title of this post could be quite tricky to translate in many languages because not everyone uses the expression in the same way, and certainly don’t use the same words. I chose this especially because I thought I’d write a little about using Machine Translation in SDL Trados Studio.
I’m not going to talk about properly trained Machine Translation engines such as SDL BeGlobal, which can be configured and improved to provide remarkably good translations in a short period of time for very large numbers of words… so achieving economies of scale that would be unthinkable with human resources alone. Instead, I’m going to talk about how a Translator can make use of the growing number of Machine Translation resources in a way that might make sense for them.
We can all have a good laugh at the way a Machine Translation can often make a mess of a translation, so a sentence like this:
“There are several ways to skin a CAT, and one of them is to use Machine Translation.”
becomes a translation like these:
“Der er flere måder at huden en kat, og en af dem er at bruge maskinoversættelse.”
“Er zijn verschillende manieren om de huid van een kat, en een van hen is het gebruik van Machine Translation.”
The Machine Engine would need to understand more about the context, or the sentence would need to be authored in a way that made it easier language to interpret. In my single sentence example the Danish fares better, probably because this expression is also used in Danish. One of SDL’s Freelance users, Eunike Hanson, gave me a better translation where we won’t actually skin a cat:
“Der er mange måder at flå en CAT på. Maskinoversættelse er en af dem.”
The Dutch on the other hand, courtesy of an SDL Business Consultant, Fleur Schut, needed a trip to Rome to explain the same thing:
“Bij het gebruik van CAT tools zijn er meerdere wegen die naar Rome leiden. Een ervan is de integratie van automatische vertaling.”
Certainly this illustrates just one of the difficulties Machine Translation has to overcome. However, not all documentation is written in language like this, so we’re presented with a useful opportunity for Translators who have access to this kind of technology.
So first of all let’s take a look at what technology we’re talking about here. Out of the box Studio 2011 is installed with these Machine Translation Providers:
- SDL BeGlobal Community
- SDL BeGlobal Enterprise
- Google Translate
- SDL Automated Translation
Of these the second one requires you to have access to a BeGlobal setup that has probably been trained specifically for a customer using Machine Translation for large volume translation. But the other three are readily accessible, although Google does charge for this service.
Now imagine you have translated this sentence before
“There are several ways to use a translation tool, and one of them is to use Machine Translation.”
“Een vertaaltool kan op verschillende manieren worden gebruikt, en een ervan is het toepassen van Machine Translation.”
If I then open a document, obviously one I made up, that contains this sentence and then variants of it, how long would it be before a Machine Translation of the fuzzy matches becomes more useful to you than the fuzzy match from your own Translation Memory?
The answer to this question is of course subjective, and in some cases it may even be faster to simply clear the translation and write it manually. However, it may also be that after testing this for a while you may find that most of the time anything less than a 50% match b