Google Language Tools for the Industry

Google Language Tools have been around for a long time now, along with other machine translation tools. Are they useful to the translation industry?

The answer is indisputably, “Yes!”, though possibly not in the way you’d think.

First of all, the tools are essentially useless for production level text. The kind of gibberish they produce can glean basic information of what the text is saying, but any subtlety (and most grammar) is lost.

At Apogee Communications, we’ve had the unfortunate experience of reading some rookie contract translators using machine translation tools. They have the automatic translation done for them, then try to clean it up before sending it in. This work is always rejected before the client sees it, as it is never suitable no matter how much editing is done to it. Why? Because it proceeds from a word-by-word basis (dictionary lookup), rather than a concept-by-concept basis (“How would this whole concept be best rendered in my target language and culture?”).

We’ve seen this most often with Japanese to English translations (which are particularly excretable in machine language form), as well as some English to German translations (Why did they do that? These languages are close to one another anyway … How could you screw it up?). The results are never pleasing to the eye or ear and are always rejected.

So, how are the tools useful? Speaking as an active coordinator of Apogee’s many projects, it helps a great deal to verify parts of a translation. There are over 45 languages we deal with, and I certainly don’t know most of them. It helps immensely to have this automated tool to double check that the right translations are matched with the right source material.

Also, there is a review technique called reverse translation. Here you get one translator to handle your English->Chinese translation, for instance, then get a second one to translate that work back to English. It’s an expensive and time consuming process, but some clients insist on it.

Google Language Tools allow a project coordinator to get an reverse translation check done immediately. It’s not as good as a human resource, but can come up with some errors in spelling and basic concepts. Particularly in large projects, with lot’s of client changes in midstream, these tools are very useful for tracking strings to their proper places.

In the near future, I would not be surprised to see more fully functional machine tools for translation. Possibly even tools which would force companies like mine into more of a review function of automatically generated translations. But that day is not today. And I’ve been following this part of the translation industry since meeting the CEO of Dragon Systems some 20 years ago. Accurate machine translations are still a Holy Grail, though we are closer to it than we once were.