I don’t know if you can recall these games from when you were a kid? I used to spend hours trying to find all the differences between the image on the left and the one on the right. I never once thought how that might become a useful skill in later life… although in some cases it’s a skill I’d rather not have to develop!
You may be wondering where I’m going with this so I’ll explain. Last weekend the SFÖ held a conference in Umeå, Sweden… I wasn’t there, but I did get an email from one of my colleagues asking how you could see what changes had been made in your bilingual files as a result of post-editing Machine Translation. The easy answer of course is to do the post-editing with your track changes switched on, then it’s easy to spot the difference. That is useful, but it’s not going to help with measurement, or give you something useful to be able to discuss with your client. It’s also not going to help if you didn’t work with tracked changes in the first place because you’d need some serious spot the difference skills to evaluate your work!
Machine Translation or not Machine Translation… is this the question? It’s a good question and one that gets discussed at length in many places, but it’s not the question I want to consider today. Machine Translation has its place and it’s a well established part of the translation workflow for many professionals today. The question I want to consider today is whether you should hide the fact you are using Machine Translation or not?
The AutoSuggest feature in Studio has been around since the launch of Studio 2009 and based on the questions I see from time to time I think it’s a feature that could use a little explanation on what it’s all about. In simple terms it’s a mechanism for prompting you as you type with suggested target text that is based on the source text of the document you are translating. So sometimes it might be a translation of some or all of the text in the source segment, and sometimes it might be providing an easy way to replicate the source text into the target. This is done by you entering a character via the keyboard and then Studio suggests suitable text that can be applied with a single keystroke. In terms of productivity this is a great feature and given how many other translation tools have copied this in one form or another I think it’s clear it really works too!
Best practice! This is a phrase I’ve had a love/hate relationship with over the course of my entire career… or maybe it’s just a love to hate! The phrase is something that should perhaps be called “Best Suggestions” and not “Best Practice” because all too often I think it’s used to describe the way someone wants you to work as opposed to anything that represents the views of a majority of users over a long period of time, or anything that takes account the way different people want to work. In fact with new technology how can it be “Best Practice” when it hasn’t been around long enough in the first place? I think for a clearly defined and well established process then “Best Practice” has it’s place… but otherwise it’s often the easy answer to a more complex problem, or just a problem that is considered too hard to address.
