Proofreading and adaptation of machine and artificial intelligence translations
We help companies that want to use machine translation to recover the quality lost with MT as much as possible
Machine translation (MT) is increasingly in demand among businesses because it is a low-budget option that delivers fast quasi-translations. However, the resulting quality is unfortunately often lacking.
Studio Moretto Group has native-speaker translators who specialise in post-editing MT and AItranslations.
In practice, the result of machine translation is seen as a ‘semi-finished product’, a machine language, a new language in every respect. Its conventions and attributes are similar to natural language, but actually far from it.
Machine translationmust therefore be post-edited to obtain a finished product, content that can be used without the risk of running into the serious inaccuracies and errors typical of MT.
Why does machine translation require post-editing?
First of all, machine translation attempts to imitate the human communication process, but has the major limitation of not being able to fully analyse and understand the depth of human thought. Consequently, some of the information conveyed by the writer may be missing in the metatext.
For example, MT software cannot independently discriminate between the use of terms that are considered synonymous, even though they have subtle differences in meaning that may be perceived differently by readers according to the different emotions they arouse and due to any cultural cognitive biases that the reader may have.
Another example is figurative language: machine translation software is often unable to recognise, understand and adequately translate idioms, proverbs, aphorisms and popular sayings, which are then translated literally, not taking into account the extralinguistic significance of these expressions.
We can also mention metaphors, phrases implying irony and sarcasm, dialectal and slang terms and neologisms.
For all these expressions commonly used in human communication, it has not yet been possible to achieve automatic translations of a satisfactory quality and, for this reason it is almost always necessary to proofread translations done with automatic software, especially for documents and texts intended for use in a business environment.
Machine translation post-editing: why it is an innovative service
The proofreading and post-editing service dates back to the dawn of the translation profession: it has always been considered essential, particularly for certain highly pertinent fields such as politics, economics and law, to check the translation to ensure that the result of the process is faithful to the original.
Nowadays, we believe that proofreading a machine translation is not comparable to proofreading a translation done by a human translator, because editing MT is not editing human thought, but artificial quasi-thought, which is distorted and unintelligent (even in the case of artificial intelligence), especially because it lacks the element of ‘purpose’: the translation is not modulated based on the reader and the context in which it will be used, because this context cannot be understood by the machine translator.
For this reason, the editor needs to be specialised in reworking texts pre-translated with MT, which means not only correcting grammatical errors and imperfections due to inevitable misunderstandings, but also further reworking to restore all necessary contextual information so that communication is ultimately effective and fulfils the writer’s purpose.
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