Post Survey Note: Thank you to all those who completed the survey. It’s no longer live, but you can see the final results in the article.
For the last couple of years I’ve been enjoying the TCLoc Masters degree at the University of Strasbourg. It’s been a really interesting time for me helping to fill in a lot of gaps and widen my technical knowledge around localization, and introducing me to the world of Technical Communication in general. This latter part was particularly interesting because half of our business at SDL relates to this; so having spent my time since 2006 working with our localization products it’s been an eye opener in many ways. I have done this in my own time and not as part of my job, but TCLoc does look like a course that’s tailor made for SDL employees!
The course work is pretty much all over now and I’m working on my dissertation which is the reason for this blog article today. I’ve chosen to question the effectiveness of voice recognition technology for dictation, compared to the use of machine translation, in particular neural machine translation. I have many opinions around this of course, but what I’m really interested in is your opinion as a group of professionals who work with this technology every working day. To get this I’m hoping you’ll spend a little time to answer the questions in this article, and I’ll try to explain the reasons for each question as I go. Each question is a simple checkbox, sometimes only one answer is allowed, sometimes multiple answers. If you have something different to say I welcome your feedback in the comments. There’s only seven questions, but thank you all in advance for sharing your views on this and helping me with this task.
An important point here is that this is not just for Trados Studio users! I’m interested in the feedback of all professionals working in this field irrespective of the tools used.
The Survey
Do you or don’t you use dictation?
To begin with I’m interested in how many of you actually use speech recognition for your translation work. Sometimes it sounds as though being able to dictate is something every translator wants to be able to do… but do they?
- I don't use voice technology at all 75%, 114 votes114 votes 75%114 votes - 75% of all votes
- I use voice for dictation of new sentences only 17%, 26 votes26 votes 17%26 votes - 17% of all votes
- I use voice for dictation of new sentences and for post-editing text 8%, 12 votes12 votes 8%12 votes - 8% of all votes
If you don’t use voice technology at all, then why is this? Certainly in the last few years we’ve heard from a very ‘vocal’ part of our profession who use it regularly.
- I've just never tried it. 23%, 49 votes49 votes 23%49 votes - 23% of all votes
- I find it exhausting to speak so much. 17%, 36 votes36 votes 17%36 votes - 17% of all votes
- It is not efficient with heavily tagged technical texts* 17%, 36 votes36 votes 17%36 votes - 17% of all votes
- I tried it and didn't find it effective. 16%, 34 votes34 votes 16%34 votes - 16% of all votes
- I use dictation already. 11%, 24 votes24 votes 11%24 votes - 11% of all votes
- My target language isn't supported. 8%, 17 votes17 votes 8%17 votes - 8% of all votes
- The additional software required is too expensive. 6%, 13 votes13 votes 6%13 votes - 6% of all votes
If you do use it then what is it that ensures you use this in preference to typing your translations?
- I don't use voice technology. 70%, 96 votes96 votes 70%96 votes - 70% of all votes
- I'm much more productive dictating my translations than typing them. 25%, 35 votes35 votes 25%35 votes - 25% of all votes
- I have a disability making it difficult to type. 5%, 7 votes7 votes 5%7 votes - 5% of all votes
What about Machine Translation?
I can still recall the times when the idea of using machine translation was considered laughable and very few professional translators would use it. Many were curious, and of course worried about whether or not this technology would replace them, but it was mainly the butt of a good joke! Today however things are different. Most translation tools provide a variety of plugins for machine translation and it’s probably fair to say that most translators working with CAT tools today take advantage of it. Or is it?
- Yes 68%, 103 votes103 votes 68%103 votes - 68% of all votes
- No 32%, 49 votes49 votes 32%49 votes - 32% of all votes
Some CAT tools provide the ability to work interactively with machine translation as well as supporting an ability to pre-translate and post-edit. So if you do use machine translation, here’s a few questions… tick all that apply.
- I use the machine translation interactively as a useful resource 45%, 79 votes79 votes 45%79 votes - 45% of all votes
- I don't use machine translation in my CAT tool 26%, 45 votes45 votes 26%45 votes - 26% of all votes
- I pre-translate my files and post-edit them afterwards 25%, 44 votes44 votes 25%44 votes - 25% of all votes
- Primarily used for post-editing translations from languages I don't know* 3%, 5 votes5 votes 3%5 votes - 3% of all votes
- I didn't know I could pre-translate with machine translation 2%, 3 votes3 votes 2%3 votes - 2% of all votes
One of the benefits of neural machine translation is its fluency. The quality of the sentences have become incredibly good, especially for some languages, and this is the main reason we are seeing so many new solutions appearing on the market and also why so many translators have adopted its use today. But this is a double edged sword, because it’s much harder to spot the mistakes and neural machine translation will sometimes sacrifice accuracy for fluency. Because of this the processes in place for quality assurance need to be really good, especially when post-editing.
One way to make this easier and still retain your productivity is to use speech synthesis. What I mean by this is you can use voice technology in the form of text to speech to read the source, or the target, to you. This way, for example, you could listen to the source and read the target simultaneously while you are post-editing. Perhaps not a solution for everyone, but for professionals with the right skillsets it might be a useful productivity boost and assist with the quality control while post-editing.
So my questions here would be…
- I don't use text to speech technology 77%, 121 vote121 vote 77%121 vote - 77% of all votes
- I didn't know it was possible to use a solution like this 11%, 18 votes18 votes 11%18 votes - 11% of all votes
- I use it while translating to read back my work 9%, 14 votes14 votes 9%14 votes - 9% of all votes
- I use it to assist with post-editing all translations (human or machine) 3%, 4 votes4 votes 3%4 votes - 3% of all votes
- I use it to assist with post-editing machine translation 1%, 1 vote1 vote 1%1 vote - 1% of all votes
And my final question in this short survey is related to whether you, as a user of dictation solutions, think the ongoing improvements in machine translation will supersede the productivity gains you have seen through dictating all your work. There could be a variety of answers around a question like this so just tick all that apply and of course feel free to add in any additional comments of your own.
- Post-editing is too difficult using dictation, it's faster to type. 52%, 69 votes69 votes 52%69 votes - 52% of all votes
- Machine translation has improved so much I don't need to use dictation anymore. 35%, 46 votes46 votes 35%46 votes - 35% of all votes
- I use a combination of dictation and keyboard for post-editing. 11%, 15 votes15 votes 11%15 votes - 11% of all votes
- I still prefer to use dictation for post-editing. 2%, 3 votes3 votes 2%3 votes - 2% of all votes
Survey over!
That’s it… and if you made it this far and have completed the survey thank you very much! Before you go, I added some sharing buttons at the end of this blog, so please feel free to share this through the social platforms you use and hopefully you can help me to improve the significance of the results with a larger data set to play with.
And of course if you have any opinions you’d like to share that won’t fit into anything I’ve said so far feel free to post your comments below… I’ll welcome the discussion.
“The badass is an uncommon man of supreme style. He does what he wants, when he wants, where he wants.” (
AdaptiveMT was released with Studio 2017 introducing the ability for users to adapt the SDL Language Cloud machine translation with their own preferred style on the fly. Potentially this is a really powerful feature since it means that over time you should be able to improve the results you see from your SDL Language Cloud machine translation and reduce the amount of post editing you have to do. But in order to be able to release this potential you need to know a few things about getting started. Once you get started you may also wonder what the analysis results are referring to when you see values appearing against the AdaptiveMT rows in your Studio analysis report. So in this article I want to try and walk through the things you need to know from start to finish… quite a long article but I tried to cover the things I see people asking about so I hope it’s useful.
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!
In the last year or so I’ve had the pleasure of watching 
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.
I believe this interesting quote can be found in “Prometheus Bound”, a play by a Greek dramatist called Aeschylus. I haven’t read the play, but I like the quote, and it certainly lends itself to the importance of memory… even when we refer to a Translation Memory rather than your own built in capability. It’s because your Translation Memory is such an important asset to you that you need to regularly maintain it, and also reuse it wherever possible to expand the benefits you get from it.