February 11, 2009
Do You Have What It Takes to Be a Successful Translator?
Recently, I just watch this movie “Slumdog Millionaire”. It is a very compelling movie illustrating a man’s journey in finding his own dreams, true love and destiny.
It strikes a deep thought for me. We will never know our true purpose until we step out and start this self-discovery journey. We just gonna keep on believing and taking actions towards our dream.
When I first joined my friend’s translation company, a lot of my people (even my family members) start to question me. Are you making the right move? What if the situation does not turn out the way that you want? Are you getting enough to spend each month? Blah…Blah…Blah. Lot of negativities being thrown to me.
I have been with my company for almost 2 years now. Looking back, it has been a very fruitful experience for me. We have led our company to new heights each year. Our team of translators has also grown in size to over one hundred till now. This is definitely a more challenging experience than my previous engineering job. Besides equipping with good translation skills, I also need to do project management, sales and marketing and leading my own translator teams. The true joy is seeing your company and yourself growing daily.
If you ask me, what it takes to be a Successful Translator? Is it…
a) Passion
b) Perseverance
c) Continuous Learning
d) Continuous Improvement
Well, my answer is all of the above. Hopefully at the end of our journey, we would become a better person to our society and this world. And not forgetting, to fulfill our ultimate destiny and purpose in life.
Well, some said it is written.
January 28, 2009
Human vs Machine Translation – Which is better?
Machine Translation (MT) is generally understood as the process in which a “machine” (specificaly a computer program or software) is substituting words and phrases in one langauge to another.
But if you do understand a little bit of the language in which you have translated your document into, you will quickly notice the translation problems. And the end result is definitely not what you have desired and clearly not of publishable quality.
MT Softwares consist of dictionaries and algorithms to compose a sentence according to grammar rules of a language. The inherent difficulty in machine translation is that it does not discern the context and intended meaning the way humans can. It doesn’t take into the meanings of words, word combinations, sentences, paragraphs, or the whole text structure. It knows nothing about rhetoric and style. It only diligently substitutes words and expressions taken from a dictionary into another language.
Of course, nobody wants their document content to be turned into a meaningless word mesh. And there are specific styles of translations that machine tools cannot handle properly. The basic purpose is to translate the message and meaning of the document and not just words and phrases. For this, it is always better to engage the services of professional translation agencies that employ native speaking human translators.
A human translator is still needed to correctly convey the exact meaning of the source text. No matter how advanced translation tools have become, they cannot be regarded as a substitute for a competent human translators.
It is true that MT can offer better alternatives in term of speed and cost. But if you intend to have a good translated document or marketing collaterals, accuracy is still of utmost important. As of now, MT has not achieved that kind of high accuracy yet. In a way, you would not want to submit a document full of syntax and grammar errors to your clients. The “translated” copy will not make any sense to your clients. Eventually, it will cost more if the documents need to re-translate again by a human translator.
Developers of Machine Translation software recognize these limitations and advise to use these translations as drafts only. This is to enable the users to check the meaning of the foreign language document quickly and inexpensively.
January 16, 2009
Why are Native Translators preferred?
Some may wonder why native translators are most preferred. Well, not only do they know the culture of their country and hence able to bring out the meaning of the translated text for the people to understand, they also understand the language of what they are translating. Because if they don’t, this is what will most probably happen…
WhizWordz - Translation and Copywriting 