Human translation is a better investment than machine translation

Human translation is a better investment than machine translation. Here are three reasons.

First,

Humans make errors and mistakes in speaking and writing. We predict and understand the proper meaning from the context. To get satisfactory results from computer translation, we need to put all the possible variables into the computer memory. I don’t think that’s possible because even humans cannot predict all the errors and mistakes. Even humans put a lot of memories into a translation program, it is hard for the program to deliver perfect meanings into different language. Human need to do final review and modification of the results from the program.

Second,

Some words have multiple meanings. We recognize them from the context but sometimes computer suggests improper results. For an experiment, I put a sentence ‘He caught a fish at the bank’ into the Google Translator and converted it into Korean. As you may know, the bank in this sentence means a ‘dike’ not a financial institution, and the program failed to deliver the right meaning even though it already has information on every single word in this sentence.

Third,

Speaking and writing can be said as creative processes. To select right words for translation, the one translating source texts should understand human emotions and sometimes knowledge of human history or cultural understanding is required. Let’s say we translate a sentence delivering typical and cultural mood into the other language of which cultural background is totally different. We can make footnotes or express it in different way agreeable to the culture of the target language while a computer is doing word-for-word translation.

Therefore, spending money on human translators is a better investment than computer translators.