Why Human Translators will not be Replaced by Machine Translation?

It is crystal clear that almost every industry right now is talking about machine learning, artificial intelligence, and other technologies replacing humans in the workplace. However, there are several problems with the idea of machine replacing humans in just about any industry.

Ironically, machine learning by nature is ultimately confined to rules defined by human programmers. In theory, machine translation “learns” by collecting data and use such data to improve its functions but it’s always relying on data already known. Machine translation cannot provide you with creative translation, know when to break the rules and how to get the intention of the original author. Essentially, it can only repeat what humans have already done – and there’s nothing wrong with that. This is what it’s designed to do, they are not HUMANS.

A global machine translation system seems impossible for now; it made a great progress but still a long way to go. Although significant progress has been made with machine translation and in particular with machine learning which is more powerful in areas such as speech recognition there is a long way to go. Machine translation tools certainly have their limitations. Since language is an art form and words and sentences cannot be translated in an isolated way as the meaning of a sentence depends on the context, culture, intention of the author.

The disadvantages of machine translation outweigh the advantages. Let’s examine together some of these disadvantages:

1. Inaccurate translations, poor quality, not culturally sensitive; as the machine will opt for word for word literal translations with no comprehension of metaphors, idioms, colloquialisms or puns.
2. Will not recognize ambiguity or inaccuracies; as we said translation cannot be based on the lexical meaning only. However, a human translator will spot if there is an inaccurate or perhaps inappropriate word in the original document.
3. Security and Data Issues, as Your Security Could Be Compromised; with a machine you need to be sure that information security is not compromised and top translation companies will meet International Security Management standards so that your data is kept secure.
4. Will miss your audience; machine translation does not know your audience. To reach your audience effectively, you need a trained eye combined with years of language experience – and that’s precisely what we offer in Globalize.

The complexity of any language is something only humans can fully understand. We can finally say that machine translators can never beat the human translators since no machine translator is perfect.