The limits of machine translation

Peripherals that translated instantly from one language to another to hold a conversation in a language that we do not handle.Applications for cameras that translate the text of signs, posters, etc. Google and its neuronal translator that is constantly fed back.Machine translation (Mt) It has advanced by leaps and bounds in recent years. It has become a tool of the translator and one factor more client-company relationship.

However, despite all the progress, machine translation still lacks constraints.

The most obvious of all is its complete ineffectiveness for translating literary texts. You can Google to understand syntactic relations between sentences, but (for now) cannot understand the subtle nuances between synonyms, how gun a metaphor or a antonym, humor, etc. Surely we can translate a manual for employees of 100 pages but we can not translate or the first line of leaves of grass .

Also, the machine translation engine, to the not be able to interpret, does not work with poorly written texts. If the wording of a text is poor, ambiguous or spelling mistakes, the TA cannot too in this regard. Therefore must be account a step of editing prior to the use of the engine to make sure that the result is not something unreadable. TA engines cannot be interpreted when the depict elements are not in place: "Yes" or "Yes", "who" or "what", "how" or "how", etc.

It is not recommended to use the automatic translation when the text that we must translate is very technical. Surely, we can use the Google Translator to translate the manual of a cell phone, but it would be impossible to translate the manual of a hydraulic crane, in which we have an extensive knowledge on the subject to translate it. The same can be said about many of the legal texts: the laws are different in each country, so the translation of a Word will also be different depending on the country. "Court", for example, is "Court" in Argentina (except in the Supreme Court), while in Spain is used if "cut" as a standard translation.

The purpose of this blog was not to criticize the use of the TA, simply warn about some of their limitations. Trusted Translations, we encourage its use whenever possible, since every day we witness a steady improvement.