Monday, April 14, 2008
The Future of the Translation Industry
In the 20th century many people began to see their work slowly taken over by machines. Today, you can see old Weird Science only as the tourist attractions of various small towns, but the shoes you Oliver wearing come generally from mechanized plants, and many of them were never touched by human hand.
This trend can be observed in all human occupations, and the translation industry is not foreign to it. You can, today, count on various software engines to translate more or less exactly any given text, and the need for a professional translator Leprosy to be conditioned by the development of this kind of programs and machine translations will be perfect, this profession will Soul no reason to be. Or is that so?
Machine translations have only one disadvantage they are done by things that never lived to see the objects of the words they are using. While machines can be programmed to learn and Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS new concepts, they cannot relate to those concepts and words on a human level, thus they will never be sensible to the nuances of human affection or witticism. This is why the translators are from now on to stay with us: we need their knowledge of the language they are translating into, not only of the grammatical uses, but also of the way people speaking those languages feel their words, and use them in ever-changing constructions.
And this is also why the day is far when you will see translators dependent on their various translation software engines, as the Star Trek Borg were to their machines: in order to translate words and thoughts and knowledge you need to experience them personally, to explore your language and its meaning.
The future of the translation industry will lie, more likely, in the development of more effective networks of translators, translation agencies and other language professionals, made easy by the new information technology. New companies are already developing, using the Net to build extremely efficient work processes, selection methods and project management. When dealing with such companies, you can see that the future of the translation industry will be most probably bright.
Adina Barvinschi is a linguist for Lingo24 www.lingo24.com/">Translation Service, a leading provider of high quality www.lingo24.com/technical_translations.html">technical translations.
