A modern translation technology
between euphoria and mistrust
Purchasing departments expect miracles. Specialist departments fight back vehemently. Some expect fabulous savings potential, while others fear a huge drop in quality. One thing is for sure: No one can stop talking about machine translation and post-editing.
The myth of savings potential
Can you get a low-cost professional translation?
No, machine translation will not reduce your translation cost to virtually zero overnight. This long-held hope cannot become a reality due to several factors:
- The larger your TMs, the lesser the quantitative effects of machine translation. This means: Since your TM is able to pre-translate more of the content, less content is left over for machine translation to handle.
- We can train your own, customized MT engine. However, this requires an extensive database.
- You still must invest a lot of effort in data preparation.
- Machine translation is only as good as your source texts. Machine translation requires a lot of discipline in order to deliver consistent, reliable quality. Uniform source texts and clear language that avoids complex wording are just as necessary as perfect grammar, spelling and punctuation. Otherwise, the machine translation results have to be revised during a complex post-editing stage. This often results in cost exceeding the expected savings.
- If your source texts are not optimally written or prepared for machine translation or if they need to be machine translated into multiple languages, then we strongly recommend pre-editing. Our language experts will optimize your content during pre-editing. This ensures that machine translation produces an optimal result. Here, too, there is additional cost, which pays off in the next step, since post-editing will be less time-consuming thanks to the pre-editing step.
The myth of quality loss
Is machine translation a low-grade language service?
No, machine translation does not necessarily imply a poor-quality technical translation. The results of machine translation can be quite impressive.
To achieve this, however, a few conditions must be met:
- Your source texts must be flawless. Machine translation is unforgiving when it comes to any grammatical, spelling or punctuation errors.
- Ideally, you should take into account the rules of writing copy optimized for translation.
- In the best-case scenario, you will use trained MT engines.
- Never skip professional post-editing in accordance with ISO 18587. Do you only need to convey the gist of your text? Is the translation not intended for patients and users or will it be published? In this case, light post-editing often suffices.
mt-g: Your reliable partner
for machine translation in the medical sector
Machine translation & post-editing may also be employed in the medical sector without fear as long as you have realistic expectations. Our professional post-editors are specialists in the field of medical translation. With our accurate post-processing, you will get a result that is equivalent to human translation.
From mere post-editing of machine-translated texts to one-stop machine translation & post-editing, together we will develop a customized solution for your project. This way, you will benefit by getting the most out of machine translation while maintaining the same quality you would expect in a human translation.
