KY-LSP says Cultural knowledge beats MT

An Ad

Integrate business news on your website free of charge and offer your visitors up-to-date content! Click here for more information.

Terry and Sylvie Gadness, owners of Groupe Mistral, a Mercer, Kentucky-based language service provider (LSP) agree that it's the knowledge of cultures that is important which is why they believe human translators will never be replaced by computers, writes the Advocate Messenger.

After 15 years in business and with a network of language translators offering more than 60 European, African and Asian tongues, Groupe Mistral has worked for clients including Disney, Hewlett Packard, Dictaphone and Panasonic. From their experience the translators agree that while computers and modern communications are a necessary part of running a business it's pretty clear that machine translation systems will never replace human translators. "For a while, computer gurus were telling everybody, 'Computer translations are going to take things over. You're not going to have to hire translators anymore,'" Terry Gadness is cited. "That was 15 years ago and we're still waiting. The computers can't keep up with the changes in language."

Among Groupe Mistral's projects was a proofreading job that turned out to become a retranslation of a machine translated document. It was an American PR firm's proposal directed at the president of Congo.

"They ran it through a computer translator and sent it to me for editing and I said, 'No, this is absolutely unacceptable.' When you're talking about the higher ups in the Congo and in French Africa, they are very proud of their language and they're extremely educated. I had to have it re-translated overnight because it had to be printed out and given to the U.N. ambassador to Congo who was going back to Congo and had to put it on (then-president) Lauren Kabila's desk."

Read the Article at : amnews.com