Quote:
Originally Posted by erimir
My department is working on making those jobs obsolete.
We haven't succeeded yet! Hence why we had a talk this semester by a researcher who was working on computer-aided translation - tools to make human translation easier and faster. And there are sites like Duolingo that crowd-source translation, which also may hurt the professional translator business.
The trend seems to be that machine translations get better and better the more data we have, and any language pair where you can make a living translating is probably generating enough data that the machines will overtake it (and in fact, professional translators are generating the data that will be fed into the machines). We still have some way to go even on similar languages with tons of data, like English-Spanish.
When it comes to getting creative use of language to work in translation, however, I doubt that will be coming any time soon. Publishers won't want to entrust translation of novels, scripts, video games, etc. to machines for a good long while.
All of this to say... I would be aware that it's a field that's likely to be in for some serious changes.
|
Several years ago I owned a hobby shop and found many of the instructions for plastic models produced in Japan to be quite humorous. A translator who does not have a subjective understanding of both languages will be at a loss. I don't see machines achieving that kind of understanding for many years, it still takes a person who can understand the meaning intended, to translate meaning. Translating words is not enough.