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4 Reasons Why Machine Translation Won’t Beat Human Translation – Yet

Image of a woman with liine of codes projected onto - illustration for an article on translation by machines and humans on the Absolute Translations website.

If you work in an industry that either employs or provides products and services to individuals speaking different languages, you’ll know that translation is an essential service in keeping your organisation running smoothly. You’re not alone — job opportunities in the localisation industry have grown 46 percent in the last decade. But where so many companies fall short is in how they conduct their translations. 

From Google Translate to the most sophisticated machine translation software, it has never been quicker or easier to get a document translated. But while these tools can be great for quickly getting a simple idea across, where they fail mostly is in intuitive, complex communications. Luckily, humans are excellent translators — better than any machine or AI (Artificial Intelligence) on the market. Here’s why.

Comprehension is key

If you’re multilingual to any degree, you’ve likely spent some time messing about with Google Translate and chuckling when you find a mistranslation. Any word or phrase with multiple meanings (in jargon, we call this “polysemous”) can really stump machine translators, as their programming forces them to take the words individually and present the most direct and linear translation possible. Additionally, some words in Language A may have direct translations in Language B that just aren’t used in everyday language. Here’s an example using some boilerplate legal English, translated to Spanish:

Capture of a Google Translate translation from English to Spanish, on the Absolute Translations website

Any Spanish reader would tell you that while this makes sense, it’s not really correct. This is the general impression that quick Google translations give: just a bit… weird. In linguistic jargon we call this “unidiomatic”. In more complex communications, like marketing or advertising, pieces that boast linguistic expressions or plays on words,  a Google translation will hardly ever give you a satisfactory result. Any complex communication targeting any specific audience will still require a human translator who understands the intricacies of the language, culture and society of that audience to successfully translate that communication and achieve the same result.

 

Culture and society dictate

Machine translation largely depends on programmers, not translators, to design the systems by which it operates. As a result, these systems often lack understanding of context and cultural nuance within a document or conversation. Humans, on the other hand, are living beings, they learn, they evolve and they grow, just like societies and their languages learn, evolve and grow.

Humans are able to take in the totality of a piece of text and build their translation with that in mind, rather than working linearly like a machine does. 

Also cultural consideration can be important when dealing with international businesses, and the quality, adequacy and appropriateness of a translation can make or break a deal. Human translators are able to effectively translate slang, idioms, tone, style, register, and other cultural aspects that might otherwise cause confusion or offence if translated literally or word-for-word. 

Similarly, languages are always evolving, especially amongst younger age groups, and highly trained translators will know and be accustomed to always double-checking the usage of certain words within their cultural context and use them appropriately in their translation work. 

Going one step further, if we consider the translation of Health & Safety guidelines or protocols the end result must be 100% accurate in order not to put lives at risk. Using AI for that purpose would be risky business, and the human translator using his expert knowledge will continue to play a key role – for quite some time yet. 

 

Creativity inspires

Creativity and uniqueness are essential in conveying your brand messages to your audience. A machine will always be a machine, and during its mechanical translation process  it will likely strip that uniqueness away, leading to bland and uniform translations that won’t capture the new  audience the way the original message did. 

That is where “transcreation” comes into play. Transcreation is a combination of ‘translation’ and ‘creation’, and this form of translation taps into the translator’s creativity, where, rather than a translator, his role is to be a writer, ensuring that the copy he is re-creating, is uniquely suited to the new audience, the same way the original copy was uniquely suited to the original audience. 

With the right amount of creativity, human translators will keep this monopoly in translation, and we’ll be safe – for some time yet.

 

A Code of Ethics binds

Every professional translator is a member of a professional association and bound by its rules. For instance, in Australia, members of the Australian Institute of Interpreters and Translators (AUSIT) are bound by the following code:

  • respect their clients’ rights to privacy and confidentiality
  • decline to undertake work beyond their competence or accreditation levels
  • take responsibility for the work of people under their supervision
  • decline to mix promotional activity for clients with interpreting or translation work
  • guard against misuse of inside information for personal gain
  • guard against encroaching on the work of co-members
  • maintain professional detachment, impartiality and objectivity
  • refer to arbitration by the National Council of any dispute with other members and to accept the Council decision as binding.

This implies that professional translators are bound by a professional code and will not share any company information without the express permission of the owner of that information.

Professional translators can also sign confidentiality agreements which adds an extra layer of security. Machines unfortunately don’t offer this level of protection of information. In fact, if you agree to Google Translate’s terms and conditions (which you do implicitly whenever using the service), you are giving Google the right to “use, host, store, reproduce, modify, communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute content.” This is obviously unacceptable in many fields — should sensitive information like bank details, personal addresses, proprietary methods, or server information become public, it could be devastating to a company and its employees. Similarly, if Google were to glimpse a particularly innovative product that you’ve developed, and if it were to reproduce the same product and release it ahead of yours, you’d have no legal recourse, as you agreed to their terms.

If nothing else, this should be the one argument that convinces organisations to use a professional human translator over a machine even when it comes to just ‘getting the gist’ of what a document says. Running a document through Google is essentially passing up on its privacy and confidentiality. So next time you need to quickly translate a few documents, stop and think: is the speed really worth the risk?

How to Boost Migrants’ Quality of Life with Language

Photo of a family featuring a mother, father and daughter, illustrating Absolute Translation's blog on language technology and its positive impact for migrants

When people move away from their place of birth and into a country where they don’t speak the national language, integrating into that new society can be a real struggle. The language barrier can cause migrants to lose out on employment opportunities, have their access to social groups restricted, and even endanger their lives in the event of a natural disaster or a medical emergency. While most governments provide language learning options for incoming migrants, the providers of those services can be inflexible in their accessibility. So how can authorities lower the language barrier and prove their countries to be a safe and welcoming new home for migrants in the modern day?

Access to the Community

Integration is a multifaceted and inter-directional process, but language is one of the biggest barriers hampering a migrant’s access to their desired communities. While many migrants gravitate towards communities where their own native language is spoken, such as expatriate clubs or similar social groups, social acceptance in the broader society of the region they’ve migrated to requires a working knowledge of the local language. 

In a 2020 study of non-European immigrants to Sweden, the study participants felt that learning Swedish was important for them in understanding Swedish culture, and in being socially accepted by native Swedes. Their sense of belonging within Swedish society was directly tied to their fluency with the Swedish language. When they spoke their native languages (mostly English, which is also widely spoken by native Swedes), they felt that they were judged as ‘outsiders’ — unless an immigrant can speak the language of their new home, they won’t be accepted into native speakers’ social circles. Instead, they will gravitate towards other immigrants who speak their preferred language.

One large benefit of immigrants learning the language of their host country is representation.  Through fluency, immigrant groups are able to properly advocate for their legal, social, and cultural rights, which allows them to maintain their own identities while still integrating into their host country. This leads to greater strengths in cultural diversity, anti-discrimination policies, and the social image of migrant groups.

Access to Employment

In a 2019 interview with Caritas Europa, Migration Policy Institute associate policy analyst Aliyyah Ahad said “Language is tied to employment and to the quality of that employment; the better the language skill the more likely a newcomer will have access to good jobs…”

Migrants are often under pressure to get employed, due to a number of reasons ranging from covering their living costs, to sending money to family back home, to displaying a willingness to contribute to their host society.

Although many migrants are highly skilled, if they are unable to confidently communicate their knowledge, those skills will go to waste.

Ahad emphasises care in allowing newcomers to learn until fluency, rather than forcing the quickest entry into employment — this is not just to the immigrant’s benefit, but also to the host country’s. “Gains to the GDP will be the most obvious [benefit], as a result of increasing the productivity of the country by making use of the talents and skills that are within the territory,” Ahad states.

In a 2011 report on using specific language instruction styles to boost immigrants’ employment prospects, the Migration Policy Institute recommended that policymakers:

  • Expand language instruction that is contextualised for workplace use.
  • Combine language and skills training.
  • Encourage partnerships and work with employees.
  • Encourage workplace-based instructions.
  • Take into account the needs of nontraditional students.
  • Evaluate programs and share and support effective practices.

Access to Care

As many medical procedural TV series have shown us, one of the most dangerous places to find a language barrier is in a hospital. If a patient and medical professional can’t adequately communicate, it can lead to misdiagnosis or extended delays in treatment, and subsequently severe complications to the patient’s health. This has been accentuated throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, as border closures and rapid changes to procedure caused miscommunications even among those who share a native language.

Similarly, as we in eastern Australia have recently learned, information dissemination during times of natural disaster relies on language fluency. If an immigrant is not aware of their host country’s channels for reporting local disasters — or if their fluency is too low to properly understand — they can be in very real danger of harm, or worse.

In these instances, technological innovations are often the quickest (if not the cleanest) solution. By applying foreign language subtitles to television broadcasts, hosts and migrants can be on the same page in the event of a disaster. Similarly, personal real-time translators like those offered by companies like Timekettle or Pocketalk can be a boon when translation is needed instantly, like in medical contexts, though they will still miss out on some nuance. In order to get the clearest translations, we believe having an in-person, trained interpreter is the best choice.

Fluency of a host country’s language is often the first step on the road to integration for a new immigrant, and for many it can be a hard hill to climb. When information is lost in translation, it can put people’s lives at risk. There are many communities of migrants in our modern, multicultural societies, and fluency can’t be expected to be equal amongst all of them. Instead, we need to have policies, technologies, and trained professionals which allow for adequate communication between peoples and authorities, and all the different levels of education and social integration seen among them.

Content Connector API: a Must-Have for a Multilingual Site

It is likely that thousands of hours of contemplation went into perfecting the messages on your website. Countless minds from marketing, sales and operations combined to come up with something that reflects your difference in your market. There is no such thing as perfection in creativity, so it is likely that the content will have been revised and refreshed many times since then.

If you think that I am suggesting that your website is a work of art, you would be right. It is a unique reflection of who you are (at this moment in time).

That is, when it is viewed by a local native speaker in its original language.

In a globalised world, where companies wish to speak in the same way to customers spread across vast geographies, finding an efficient method to translate the content and subsequent continual updates is critical.

Enter the multilingual CMS.

Linking a multilingual CMS with a translation provider’s proprietary software via a connector is a great way of ensuring that translations are created, captured and uploaded in the application itself, without the need for external copy/pasting, greatly increasing productivity and reducing the margin of error.

Working with an experienced global translation partner in this way still means that the content will be localised and tested in-CMS and the technology allows you to keep your unified message, no matter what the target language. With complete unicode support, multilingual CMS set ups will edit and manipulate any common language correctly, with the human translators adding the final polish (as always).

The API integration of the CMS allows a partner to pull web content automatically and it reduces time spent on administration and allows a translation partner to streamline the workflow within their team.

Whether you have an urgent marketing campaign or a new service in your business, a multilingual CMS run by an experienced translation provider will allow for lightning-fast updates and accurate messaging. When new content appears in the source language, it will automatically be picked up by the tool.

Ensuring the consistency of your brand across the world has never been easier.

Of course, the human involvement with the tool is a critical aspect to achieving quality and consistency across languages. Whether you would like a machine-translated piece turned into quality content, or you would like human translators to look after the translation from scratch, the ultimate goal is that a French, Spanish or Mandarin speaker “feels” the same way as the English speaker (in the original language) did while reading your content. That is why you need to partner with a translation agency that is well-versed in collaboration with technology and sees it as the great enabler of globalised communication.

Absolute Translations have long been at the forefront of technological advances in our industry. We now offer a direct integration of client CMS systems with our translation tool through a connector and we are moving forward with this as a standard model for working with our international clients.

We would love to have a chat with you to discuss how your international messaging can be continually polished and perfected.

Veerle Vanderplasschen

How Translators Help You to Refine Your Meaning

Preparing a piece of communication for public broadcast can be a daunting task, let alone having it translated into languages you don’t understand.

It seems obvious, but getting your communication right before embarking on a project like that is essential.

When companies or individuals communicate in their native language, there is naturally minimal thought put into how they will be perceived. People tend to assume that it will be perceived in much the same way that they view it (which is a fallacy to start with), but in actual fact the implied meaning is often far from how it is interpreted.

Any communication directed at a specific target audience should be written through the eyes of that target audience.

When we undertake a translation project, our first consideration is to always picture the recipient. Who are they, why is this message for them and how might their cultural background interpret our translated words?

When we share this approach with our clients, we notice that some of them start to analyse the text that they are asking us to translate. It might read a certain way in their language, but will the translation in a foreign language be able to convey the same message as the original intended? It is not that surprising, but the discussions sometimes lead to a realisation that their original content isn’t quite as ‘fit for purpose’ as they thought it was.

You only find new meaning when you are challenged to search for it.

The basics of being a good translator is to ascertain exactly what the source document means. But it certainly helps if the source text is on point. We delve deep into the layers of meaning, questioning our clients when something is unclear, and it is in that space of uncertainty that they themselves realise that they could be communicating more effectively in their own language.

I am happy to say that this is another reason why I think that translators will remain ahead of the machines, in providing a consultative rather than a mechanical service.

Secondly, it is surprising how little thought goes into some corporate communications. Just because you are putting words onto the page doesn’t mean that they are the right words. Our job is to be pinpoint in our choice of words; and when you have a translation partner that adopts such a forensic approach, it is worth checking that you have chosen the right words in the first place. Otherwise the exercise can start to resemble a twisted game of Chinese whispers. If we think that something doesn’t sound quite right for the context, we will attempt to mention it. We are here to add value in any way we can.

I suppose that is why I love my job so much. Our teams of translators are all trained to question these sorts of things and I often get the feedback that they have added massive value in that way.

No thought is perfect, and every piece of writing can be improved.

Why don’t you work with a translator who will not only translate your words but will also seek to challenge them when they feel it necessary?

by Veerle Vanderplasschen

Chabuduo. Or is it?

If I am an Australian consumer of a Chinese product, do I care that the accompanying literature is written in broken English?

“It must have been hard to translate. I understand the basic gist. No worries.”

But then someone else might wonder why a producer does not make a bigger effort, if they could positively influence their export success?

In a world where brand loyalty and storytelling are intimately connected, what was a compelling story in the original language, can easily become uninspiring drivel if the same care isn’t taken with the translation. The consumer will simply move on to another brand whose story is more carefully crafted.

There is no place for shoddy translations ruining corporate stories anymore. Well, not for the brands that care about their customers, anyway.

Your audience

I have written before about the difference between translation and transcreation, and the essence is found in this thought: a transcreation must make the target audience feel the same way as the original article made the original audience feel.

Let’s take an advertisement. The purpose of an advertisement is to attract the attention of people towards a product or service, and to ultimately move those people to purchase that product or service.

An advert that leaves you feeling amused, should also leave a new audience feeling amused, if translated. Different cultures demand different approaches and if a literal, word for word translation won’t achieve the desired customer response, then a transcreation method should be adopted.

It’s all about your market and your audience. Who are they, what moves them, and how can you capture their attention?

If you are exporting, you must translate your content properly, with due regard to your audience, or you don’t do it at all.

An “okay” result risks turning off a vast swathe of your consumers who are used to being wooed.

Chàbuduō

In China, there is the concept of something being “close enough is good enough.” They even have a word for it: chàbuduō. But whenever I read an inadequate piece of writing I somehow feel that a precious moment in my life has been wasted. Why should I spend more time trying to work out what they are trying to say? If they want to attract my attention, should they not make more of an effort?

Inelegant messaging and clumsy language might suggest a deeper malaise.

And yes, it might be a translation, but there is no excuse for it not to make sense.

Apple are held up as a shining example in many respects, and their corporate messaging is no exception. Their customers might read their literature in hundreds of different languages, but they all come away feeling the same things. Apple know that each individual translation has a life of its own – it is the end customer and not the original writer who holds the key to the success of any piece of translated content.

When a company puts a piece of writing (or any other kind of content) out into the world, they do so in the full knowledge that it will be judged.

Why wouldn’t you want to write it as well as possible?

By Veerle Vanderplasschen

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