Much has happened since the ALPAC report. In less than a decade since its breakthrough, neural machine translation turned machine translation from a fascinating triviality into a useful, if still limited, tool for professional translators. This has had ramifications not only for their work but also for the structure of the translation industry.
At Tomedes (our parent company), around 17% of the language professionals we work with have not worked with machine translation, and half say they work with machine translation frequently or every day.
In MTPE, translators are provided with a document that has oman mobile database been pre-processed through a machine translation engine alongside the original text. The task of the translator is to proofread this text and make sure the translations are correct.
MTPE is a service that only became truly feasible with the rise of neural machine translation. Before Google Translate changed things up, MTPE was dismissed as more of a failure. Today, while still far from perfect, the machine output it produces is often in a condition that is workable enough for common translation projects.
One might expect that the rise of machine translation would be met broadly with suspicion by language professionals. After all, man versus machine is a classic trope of many stories in science fiction, and any form of automation has historically come with the fear that machines are coming to take people’s jobs.
Surprisingly, many of our translators do have a positive view of machine translation. The number of those who like machine translation outweighs those who dislike it, and over half of the translators we surveyed said that machine translation has had a more or less positive effect on the way they work.