Translation and Language Industry Observations

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Why human translation is better than machine translation?

Machine translation (MT) has made considerable progress in recent years. And it is poised to improve even further in the future, aided by tailwinds from the world of AI technology. But are you better off using machine translation over human translation services? Advantages of MT over Human Translation The obvious reason for your wanting to …

The Shifting Landscape of Translator Training Programs

by Luke Smith The international language services market was valued at $60.68 billion in 2022 and is predicted to jump all the way to $96.21 billion by 2032. Tech advances and increased interconnectedness across all industries are clearly calling for more professional translators across the board. In response to this demand, translator training programs are …

Will ChatGPT Eliminate Translation Jobs?

by David Grunwald Jobs across numerous fields could be replaced, according to the company ChatGPT. The tech company, which has sparked debate in recent months, said it could “potentially replace jobs that involve written communication,” such as translation services and social media managers. (Yahoo Finance) In a recent interview, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna stated that A.I. …

Is ChatGPT better than Google Translate? And why isn’t Bing using it?

by David Grunwald ChatGPT is still big news, even six months after it launched. The Italian government has banned its use in Italy. In Israel, a class action lawsuit has been filed against OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. And Germany is also considering a ban on ChatGPT. Having said all of that, ChatGPT is emerging …

5 Things that Machine Translation Can’t Do

Machine translation (MT) has made tremendous progress in the last few years. And for certain kinds of texts, it may even produce nearly perfect results. But there are still some things that it still can’t do, while human translators can. MT will not find mistakes in the source text Nothing is 100% perfect. This certainly …

What is an unwritten language and how can AI help translate it?

What is an unwritten language? Simply put, it is a language that is spoken but not written, and therefore has no written form by native speakers of that language. Unwritten languages by their very nature are obscure, and used by very few people. Spain for example has some dialects which are spoken by precious few …

Internet Censorship: China Shuts Down Google Translate

As widely reported by various media, China has shut off access to Google Translate in mainland China. Users in China that try to access translate.google.cn or translate.google.com are redirected to a link to Google Translate Hong Kong. But that won’t work in China either. Chinese also blocked the Google Translate API, rendering all apps that …

5 Free Translation Apps You May Never Have Heard Of

The popularity and usage of free translation programs is rising. More and more translation software products are being announced every year. And more and more companies are using these apps to translate a wide range of content. The quality and reliability of machine translation is also improving steadily, which is another reason for the increasing …

Using Reverse Image Search for Translation

Google Reverse Image Search Google Images has a feature which has been around since 2011, but is relatively unknown to many people. Reverse image search allows you to upload an image or a link to an image and find similar images and relevant information on the Internet. Unlike standard image search, where you enter a …

Pure human translation. Does it still exist?

By David Grunwald Is your translator or translation agency translating your material from scratch or are they using machine translation in their workflow? I contend that many or even most professional translators are using machine translation (e.g., Google Translate) in their work. But they will never tell their customers about it. Because if they do, …

Privacy please. Firefox pulls translation out of the cloud

Firefox Translations provides automated translation of web content. Unlike cloud-based alternatives, translation is done locally, on the client-side, so that the text being translated does not leave your machine (Firefox website). Do you use Google Translate, DeepL or other online translation tools? Hundreds of millions of people use online Machine Translation (MT) every day. If …

What is Metaverse and what does it have to do with translation?

Metaverse is a compound term made from the words Meta (or Beyond) and Universe. The term first appears in Neil Stevenson’s Sci-Fi novel Snow Crash (1992) and has since been adopted by the tech industry. It refers to a theoretical, futuristic vision of the Internet as a place where people will spend their time in …

The Dangers of using MT for Legal Translation

By Wojciech Wołoszyk Some law firms have in-house translation departments to deal with multilingual services. However, most law firms do not have internal translation teams and must rely on external resources. Given the high costs of translation services for legal documents and the time constraints which are always present in the legal field, the temptation …

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