One of the most challenging parts of machine translation is that of post-editing. Post-editing is occurs after the text has been translated via machine translation services. At Pangeanic. we are expers in customizing machine translation engines in your field to make the translation process faster, more efficient and economical.
The reason that it needs to occur is because machines do not possess the human’s ability to mentally convert the words into another language whilst keeping the very essence of what is being said.
Although machine translation machines can convert significant amounts of text from one language to another within a considerably short period of time, there are still downsides to the process.
Times have changed since the first machines translated documentation. The previous method involved programming in a variety of grammar rules and a full dictionary. In today’s approach it is more about selecting sentences and words that are most likely to be correct using statistics. This actually has a higher accuracy rate than the other method, however, it is still not 100% correct.
Quite often there will be some words that are just not being used in the right context and it takes a human to recognise and fix this. In some ways, it’s good to know that at least we as humans are so far, irreplaceable by translating machines.
Every industry is looking for ways to make themselves more efficient, and the translation industry has not escaped that. There is always more pressure to go faster, to produce more and for less. Customers will always want instant results for less payment. Quite often there is not enough time scheduled for translation into projects and they are done very rapidly at the last minute.
Although post editing is not a fast process, it is something that needs to be done to produce a quality and fully readable document. Without it, the results produced by machine translation are not fully usable and could even communicate something that could result in a very costly outcome.
