The might and knowledge of Google has been a driving force behind the development of machine translation, prompting some to suggest that with such a wealth of artificial intelligence in the translation realm, it won’t be long before human translation is a thing of the past.
However, while the evolution of machine translation continues, it’s clear that for now, machines are still miles away from being able to deliver the consistent and natural translation results we see from human language experts.
Translating With Google
Google Translate was one of the first machine translation systems made widely available to the public, and it continues to be updated regularly by the technology giant. The latest update saw the company launch its new mobile translation solution, which aims to bring translation technology into real-world situations.
Dubbed Word Lens, the development is a smartphone app that lets users point their phone’s camera at text and gain an instant on-screen translation. Unlike Google’s other translation endeavours, Word Lens allows live translation without requiring an internet connection, and can even translate characters and letters in real time.
And the developments don’t stop there. While regular updates made to Google Translate typically just include tweaks to the algorithms used in order to refine the results, the company has made some much bigger changes with the recently-announced launch of a Neural Machine Translation system.
According to Google experts, this system surpasses the results of any other machine translation system currently available, and can even be used for the notoriously difficult translation of Chinese into English. It does this by considering both individual words and whole sentences during the translation process, which is rumoured to raise its accuracy by between 55 and 85 per cent.
So Are We There Yet?
There have definitely been some huge steps forward over the past year in machine translation, but even Google has admitted that machine translation is not yet able to achieve the same level of accuracy or ‘mastery’ of a language as a human expert.
It’s to do with the complexities and subtleties of language and the way in which its use has evolved; the best human translators are native speakers of the target language and familiar with its subtleties and nuances. They have years of experience of the sometimes illogical quirks of the language that a machine just can’t get to grips with yet.
In practice, this means human translation offers a higher accuracy rate and a more natural flow to sentence structure. So no, we’re not there yet as far as machine translation is concerned; while it has its uses, professional work is still best left with the human translation experts.
Bubbles Translation Services are translation experts with real world business experience of their target languages. If you have an important document that needs translating, get in touch with the team today.
