A large amount of time is being spent in the media on Machine translation and Google’s efforts in that area. The obvious focus is on the technology. However, this focus misses the most important contributor – the linguist. A human linguist or translator. The base of the power for Google’s translation efforts is the body of already translated work circulating on the web as well as published works gained from it’s book scanning initiative. The translation fed into the database was done by human linguists. The point of differentiation for Google is the massive computing power they possess. Some very good points were raised in a recent NY Times article written by Miguel Helft. According to Helft, Google has quickly risen to the top of the list for automated web translation tools because, “While many translation systems like Google’s use up to a billion words of text to create a model of a language, Google went much bigger: a few hundred billion English words.”

Simply stated, Google is the best aggregrator of data in the world.  This challenge is very well suited for their strengths. However, Helft also goes on to say “Automated translation systems are far from perfect, and even Google’s will not put human translators out of a job anytime soon. Experts say it is exceedingly difficult for a computer to break a sentence into parts, then translate and reassemble them.”

There will always be a need for the human touch in translation work.  Especially when it comes to critical work or work that has a potential to cause harm if the meaning is misinterpreted. Our firm does a large volume of work for the Pharmaceutical and Medical Device industries. One of our clients makes Automatic External Defibrillators. I think most people would agree that we shouldn’t trust this type of translation work to an automated tool.

However, I think we can all agree that we should continue to create high quality translation that gets indexed by internal Translation Databases (like we use here at our firm) or external tools like Google. The end result will be fewer barriers or points of friction between countries trying to do more and more business together.