In 2016, a team of experts wrote that Google's neural machine translation system approached the accuracy achieved by average bilingual human translators [...]. And that was not the first time a similarly ominous announcement had been made. As far back as the mid-1950s, in a Paramount newsreel filmed in a room crammed with huge reel-to-reel tape drives, a computer scientist, when asked if the project he was working on would mean the end of human translators, smugly answered: Yes, for translators of scientific and technical material. And yet here we still are, very much in the loop. This humble volume looks at various aspects of machine translation, including the history of its technological advancement, quality evaluation, typical errors, techniques for improving its output, and how human translators can tame the lion and transform machine translation into a tool that can take some of the grind out of our work, in the conviction that we will always be able to add that essential touch of lexical variety, originality and inventiveness.
In 2016, a team of experts wrote that Google's neural machine translation system approached the accuracy achieved by average bilingual human translators [...]. And that was not the first time a similarly ominous announcement had been made. As far back as the mid-1950s, in a Paramount newsreel filmed in a room crammed with huge reel-to-reel tape drives, a computer scientist, when asked if the project he was working on would mean the end of human translators, smugly answered: Yes, for translators of scientific and technical material. And yet here we still are, very much in the loop. This humble volume looks at various aspects of machine translation, including the history of its technological advancement, quality evaluation, typical errors, techniques for improving its output, and how human translators can tame the lion and transform machine translation into a tool that can take some of the grind out of our work, in the conviction that we will always be able to add that essential touch of lexical variety, originality and inventiveness.
