Thirty-nine years ago, when I started out in this profession, translators were mystical beings who lived surrounded by thick dictionaries, sharp pencils and typewriters that made more noise than a mechanical keyboard on steroids. Every typo was a tragedy that had to be cleaned up with Tipp-Ex. Then came computers, WordPerfect, floppy disks and — what for us was a miracle — the first computer-assisted translation programmes, which initially confounded rather than helped us.
Today, modern translators coexist with machine translation, artificial intelligence and "post-editing", the art of fixing what the machine has translated as if it were a spaced-out Martian. And yes, it helps us, and it can save us time... yet it also forces us to spend hours on end cleaning up mistakes that only a human with a brain and a sense of humour can spot.
A machine can indeed translate words, but only a human translator who, for instance, is translating a text from English to their native language, knows whether the term "spring" means the season, a natural source of water, a metal spring or a cat doing a ninja jump.
In this regard, DeepL, an advanced machine translation tool, recently released a Spanish language version of an English promotional video that included the following message (the text on the right is the literal translation back into English):
In its eagerness to sell itself as a miracle solution that does away with human translators, DeepL has demonstrated precisely why human translators are still indispensable.
The original English message read “… the translations are the GOAT”, by which it was referring to the acronym meaning "Greatest Of All Time"). Yet DeepL took it literally to mean the animal, which in Spanish is " cabra". 🐐
No professional would fall into that trap. Only a system that does not distinguish between acronyms, idioms and context can do so.
👉 Oddly enough, while native English-speaking translators might say that anyone who thinks that a brainless machine can replace them is as mad as a hatter, in Spain one equivalent idiom migh be as mad as a goat.
In a nutshell? Goats might be faster... But human translators are still better. Technology has changed everything... except the need for a good translator with good sense, culture and coffee running through their veins.
We hope you enjoyed it! Don't hesitate to contact us if you're interested in any of our language services, whether translation or even language classes. You can contact us at info@hasting.es or www.hastingtraducciones.es.
