2023-08-17 10:40:17
The profession of translator has changed a lot in recent years. To understand these changes, we spoke with Marianne Starlander, lecturer at the Faculty of Translation and Interpretation (FTI) of the University of Geneva, in the Department of Multilingual Computer Processing (TIM).
Machine translation progress
Today, with ChatGPT and artificial intelligence, various professions are experiencing a revolution that the translation profession has already experienced since 2017, with the appearance of neural machine translation systems, in particular DeepL. The quality level of machine translation (MT) has suddenly taken a leap, making it possible to use it in workflows. At the time, translation professionals wondered what their profession was going to become.
The TIM department is researching the different models of MT and now has enough hindsight to assess the impact of MT and understand that translators are not going to be replaced by machines anytime soon. The knowledge of human translators is essential for proofreading and correcting (post-editing) texts produced by MT. Companies that decide to do without a professional to translate their website quickly realize that MT produces errors which, in the legal or marketing field, can be very expensive.
Concern among translation students
However, the students are very worried. The media often repeats that translators are no longer needed, because MT produces better results than humans. The impact of this message is visible: in general, a drop in the number of registrations is observed in translation faculties. New technologies force the Faculty to do communication work to reassure students and emphasize the importance of a professional.
Increase in demand
Paradoxically, translation needs are only growing. The amount processed by the language industry is constantly increasing. The job opening rate from the FTI is high and is not limited to translation itself. There are a large number of translation positions to be filled and a real difficulty in recruiting linguists and specialists who know how to use these technologies. International organizations (WIPO, WTO, UN) still hire permanent translators although they have integrated MT into the range of tools that allow professionals to carry out their work.
“In the language industry, there is a real difficulty in recruiting, in finding enough qualified people. »
Many language professions have emerged around these new tools. The FTI offers, for example, a master’s degree in multilingual computer processingto train students to accompany, install, set up and develop machine translation in an intelligent way.
The added value of the translator
Marianne Starlander
Although the translation curriculum has changed somewhat in recent years, there is one constant: to be able to use these technologies correctly, you have to learn to be a good translator, that is, to translate without these tools to obtain the critical spirit which will then allow them to be integrated. The FTI provides several courses to explain how these technologies work so that students are aware of the limits, of the things to be careful of when using them.
“To be able to use these technologies correctly, you have to learn to be a good translator. »
MT works well in certain areas, on general topics, as well as on short-lived texts that would not have been translated by a professional anyway, for example, an exchange of e-mails between colleagues or user-generated content from chats, forums, etc.
However, MT is of little interest for texts that have a longer lifespan, for example in areas such as marketing, localization or transcreation, because a machine has no creativity or knowledge. of a target culture. From the moment a text is intended for distribution, it needs a professional who can verify it. The translator is a quality guarantee for selling a product, publishing a brochure, localizing an advertisement or translating a legal text. It is in these specialized sectors that we find the added value of the translator, his creativity, his understanding of the context and his knowledge of the terminology and the target audience.
Impact of technologies on prices
Over the past ten years, we have seen that translators are being asked to translate more and faster using tools such as MT and translation memories. Rates, which had been stable for ten years, have fallen recently, but should stabilize. There is a lot of work, but well-paid work is harder to find. However, these tools make it possible to translate more quantity and compensate for this drop. Of course, it depends on the domain because sometimes MT is not very useful.
A communication profession
The word translator may seem simplistic, because the range of skills available to these professionals is wider. Translators do much more than translate. Of course, they master languages, but they also know cultures. They are specialists in the language or languages, cultural mediators, communicators. This side allows them to work in communication in general. It is often believed that the only outlets are translation and interpretation, but former students exercise a wide range of professions related to languages: community management, creation and management of documents, web writing, creation of multilingual content, project management, quality control, subtitling, localization, transcreation, even journalism or tourism.
“I tend to call the translators specialists in the language(s). »
Perspectives
At the moment, MT models are trained on translations and texts written by humans, but we will reach a point where these systems will start to train on automatically generated texts or on post-editing. We observe that the data is no longer as “clean” as it was at the beginning. Will we have enough human data to continue to improve quality? Will the quality go down? These questions are studied, we wonder how AT will evolve when we have more mixed data. It requires rethinking university courses, rethinking the profession in a more open way. However, we will always need specialists, people who love languages and who want to work in this area.
Credit photo : Rawpixel via depositphotos.com
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