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Monday, February 20, 2017

Localization Trends That Never Arrived: Linguists will work for a cut rate to edit machine translation

Over the years there have been many exuberant predictions of change that would fundamentally alter the localization business. However, most of these dreams of the industry have never come to pass.

Trends that never arrived: All translation will just be editing of machine translation
Most linguists simply will not work for a cut rate to edit substandard machine translation. 

Linguists see it this way—first they have to spend thousands on translation tools so they can get paid a lower rate for repetitions. Now MT means an even greater fragmentation of the rate.

It seems even more unlikely that MT (even edited) would end up being as satisfying to an end client as work completed by professional linguists. For instance, translation in Japanese, Vietnamese, or Thai by expert linguists is regularly knocked back for being “completely wrong.” This is due to style, tone and other factors specific to each tongue, and it takes nothing less than trained, experienced linguists working with client feedback to get it sounding correct to the client’s ear.

NEXT: Trends that never arrived: Trados will become the standard TM tool