Machine Translation of End User Texts
Very recently I attended the Gala conference in Istanbul. It was an interesting experience and an opportunity to mingle with peers, but that’s kind of obvious. I brought back a stack of business cards, belief that Aploq is going in the right direction, developing at its own pace and orchestrating all new developments in a perfect unison with the market, client demands and general trends.
What struck me there were two quality related discussions. One of them referred to the all-so-famous Machine Translation. MT is not terrorizing the industry anymore and small business owners sleep peacefully again. MT works along traditional, human translation and that is a well-known fact. The question raised for discussion was, as a client do you prefer to have no information provided on a given subject (=no information in a language you speak) or have something of poor quality (=MT)? It was indisputable for the majority of us, that we go for MT. As modern human beings we are used to being overinformed and overloaded with information. Fear of not having information is a medical unit known as FOMO (fear of missing out). So yes, we want rubbish instead of nothing. We will google it and then google-translate it, so much we want to have it.
The consequential question that arises from this conclusion is, what does MT do to big brands? Will HP, MS, IBM go for MT in order to provide poor quality information to the end-users? And here my marketer’s heart objects. I think that MT has its use and it is wide. End users out of respect deserve better, IMHO.
If you want to know more about this subject feel free to get in touch.
