Technology

What most people managing translations don't get is that they are essentially using the tools that translators use, but skipping the value adding step.

I've been doing translation as a side gig for years. Lately I've been doing some translations for an NGO that deals with addiction management, of which I'm part.

The materials have a lot of nuances, and need the translator to understand them, to properly convey the concepts.

The usual process for translation is to feed the original to a machine language translation software, and then work with both versions side by side, in a translation management software, tools that make editing and proofing faster and easier by a human, to achieve the best result.

Last time, someone in the organization, mono lingual, decided to do a handbook translation with ChatGPT, or something like that. They then gave the result to a colleague and me.

The resulting translation was exactly what we expected.

A problem was that some bilingual people were shown the results, and reported that the results were amazing, without realizing that they were commenting on the wow factor, not on the accuracy of the result, especially because they had not done a critical side by side comparison.

My colleague and I did the editing work, were paid less, but the end result was the usual translation quality.

The commissioning person at the org boasted that AI translation was great, obviating our work, to get their brownie points.

TLDR: translation has used machine translation as a first step for a long time, with results edited and polished by humans. Ignorant decision makers are skipping that crucial step, getting sub-par results, oblivious to the fact.