Machine translation post-editing is the process of improving a machine-generated translation with minimal manual labour. It is a new skill which many translators are not familiar with. However, with a bit of practice, it can speed up the process dramatically.
Flitto is a crowdsourcing translation and social media application that allows users to request translations into various languages, launched in 2012. Flitto supports text, image, and voice translations, and also has 1:1 Pro translation service – for those who need to respect confidentiality agreements or require professional translations – in 18 different languages. Bilingual or multilingual people who are interested in doing a little bit of translation on the side, can become translators on this platform.
Gone are the days where you would break out in a cold sweat when receiving an email written in a foreign natural language. Now you simply open your preferred web browser, call up your favorite machine translation app and, hey presto, you have a somewhat comprehensible translation at your fingertips.
At their San Francisco launch event on October 4, Google introduced the Pixel Buds. They are two earbuds connected to each other by a wire and designed to be the competitor for Apple’s AirPods. Although the two devices have the same price and same battery life, Pixel buds are able to translate 40 languages in near real time. And since the demonstration, they have taken over the internet.
As a university student in translation studies, when I first heard a professional translator talking about machine translation I was rather skeptical about this new emerging topic and I would never have thought of using it one day.
Three years ago, neural network-based translation appeared to give better results than anything researchers developed within the last twenty years. The sentences sound a lot more natural compared with previous translation methods.
The year 2017 looks promising for the translation and localization industries. The recent advances in Neural Machine Translation (NMT) have been a popular topic over the past year.
