Abstract
The aim of this research project is to verify whether machine translation (MT) technology can be utilized in the process of professional translation. The genre to be tested in this study is a legal contract. It is a non-literary text, with a high rate of repeatable phrases, predictable lexis, culture-bound terms and syntactically complex sentences (Sarcevic 2000, Berezowski 2008). The subject of this study is MT software available on the market that supports the English-Polish language pair: Google MT and Microsoft MT. During the experiment, the process of post-editing of MT raw output was recorded and then analysed in order to retrieve the following data: (i) number of errors in MT raw output, (ii) types of errors (syntactic, grammatical, lexical) and their frequency, (iii) degree of fidelity to the original text (frequency of meaning omissions and meaning distortions), (iv) time devoted to the editing process of the MT raw output. The research results should help translators make an informed decision whether they would like to invite MT into their work environment.
Highlights
On 26th April 2012 Google researcher Franz Och (2012) announced on the Google official blog that Google machine translation (MT) was at that moment used monthly by 200 million people
MT solutions are utilized by large companies (e.g., Xerox, Ford, General Motors) and institutions (e.g., European Commission, Pan American Health Organization), which without MT’s assistance would not manage to translate large volumes of text in a short time (Hutchins 2007)
The number of MT enthusiasts is still small, but it seems that we are at the breaking point, where automated translation, which has been for decades taken with a pinch of salt, is beginning to be seriously considered as a helpful tool
Summary
On 26th April 2012 Google researcher Franz Och (2012) announced on the Google official blog that Google MT (machine translation) was at that moment used monthly by 200 million people He continued quoting even more impressive figures: In a given day we translate roughly as much text as you’d find in 1 million books. MT solutions are utilized by large companies (e.g., Xerox, Ford, General Motors) and institutions (e.g., European Commission, Pan American Health Organization), which without MT’s assistance would not manage to translate large volumes of text in a short time (Hutchins 2007) These companies have throughout the years understood the limitations of automated translation and no longer expect perfection. The number of MT enthusiasts is still small, but it seems that we are at the breaking point, where automated translation, which has been for decades taken with a pinch of salt, is beginning to be seriously considered as a helpful tool
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