Jost Zetzsche, a world-renowned independent translation and localization professional, co-author with Nataly Kelly of the volume Found in...
1 min read
21/06/2016
Is the translation professional a better place now that Google Translate is 10 years old?
There was a time when professional translators were asked to provide a list of dictionaries and reference tools at home. Translations were received on paper and typed in WordPerfect 4.1 - or even typewriters! Despite the heated arguments in favor and against machine translation as a tool for translators, its use and popularity are beyond argument. Many envisaged the death of the translator and the death of translation services as a result of Google Translate's ever improving translations. However, now that Google Translate is 10 years old, it has become part of everyday life for millions of people to solve small translation problems. It helps businesses and, more importantly MT visibility has provided exposure for other to grow machine translation customization businesses, PangeaMT among them. See Google's video below to check Google Translate in action. https://youtu.be/wIK0JKTQcI8 If you were a translator before 2006, does this make you feel old? If we count the number of words translated by software (Google Translate, Microsoft's Bing, PangeaMT, Systran, etc.) and those by humans, "machines" already translate more words on a daily basis than humans. Translation has turned a software supply service in 2016. Google's translation platform has now been around for ten years. It banks on its wide 500 million user base to provide feedback on the translations and improve it output. Users can translate and interact with Google Translate interface. They can improve Google Translate's output by choosing the best alternative translation. The company's algorithms do the rest.
