What is it about?
Despite the hype surrounding Artificial Intelligence and machine translation, technology still struggles to match human expertise in accurately translating literary texts. This study on professional translators' perceptions of machine translation has revealed that despite the technological advances enabling them to do their job faster, translators feel that 'post-editing' machine-translated text constrains their work, limits their creativity and conditions them to produce a literal translation.
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Why is it important?
With a lot of hype surrounding technological advances in machine translation, it is a timely exercise to analyse how well state-of-the-art systems can deal with the most challenging and creative of translation tasks, along with human translators' perceptions of machine translation and their experiences of using machines for post-editing. While the latest systems can sometimes translate ambiguous words and phrases correctly where previous systems would have failed, participants in the study identified broader knowledge required to create an equivalent reading experience.
Perspectives
Literary translation is a highly-skilled task that may not be terribly well regarded - or well paid. So much of the discourse about artificial intelligence these days focuses on technological discplacement of jobs. This article is, I hope, an argument for Team Human.
Dr. Joss Moorkens
Dublin City University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Translators’ perceptions of literary post-editing using statistical and neural machine translation, Translation Spaces, November 2018, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/ts.18014.moo.
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