You wouldn't use a jackhammer to nail a painting to the wall.
Machine translation can be a wonderful translation tool, but its uses are widely misunderstood.
Let's talk about Google Translate, its current state in the professional translation industry, and why robots are terrible at interpreting culture and context.
You wouldn't use a jackhammer to nail a painting to the wall.
Certain language pairs are better suited for MT. Typically, the more similar the grammar structure, the better the MT will be. Think Spanish <> Portuguese vs. Spanish <> Japanese.
https://t.co/yiVPmHnjKv
Poor applications of MTPE make human translators miserable--and likely, your clients, too.
(You thought you were going to get out of it this time? Who do you think I am?)
Same word. Different sociocultural context.
But what happens when you take that fish out of the tank and plop it into a completely different one?
Unfortunately, culture is hard to change, so we make these changes to the fish itself for it to thrive in its new environment.
It's not just for translation, too--moving a fish from an British tank to an American tank requires localization, too. ("What the hell is a car 'bonnet'?")
Many contextual systems--a polysystem. Polysystem theory!
And yet.
Despite memeing on MT all the time.
Sometimes, sadly, it's capitalism. Sure, it's not good, but if it'll get a few more people to buy it, who cares?
Not only are you paying for the cost of translation, you're also paying designers for graphics (see: P5R!), additional QA to ensure the translations display correctly, and additional marketing reps in other languages.
First and foremost, we've got to inform developers and producers in the industry of the value of good localization--and why human translators are the best way to ensure your loc is good.
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This report when through dozens of edits as different equities were represented. I did not have any meetings with Sheryl on the paper, but I can’t speak to whether she was in the loop with my higher-ups.
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The story doesn\u2019t say you were told not to... it says you did so without approval and they tried to obfuscate what you found. Is that true?
— Sarah Frier (@sarahfrier) November 15, 2018
In the spring and summer of 2016, as reported by the Times, activity we traced to GRU was reported to the FBI. This was the standard model of interaction companies used for nation-state attacks against likely US targeted.
In the Spring of 2017, after a deep dive into the Fake News phenomena, the security team wanted to publish an update that covered what we had learned. At this point, we didn’t have any advertising content or the big IRA cluster, but we did know about the GRU model.
This report when through dozens of edits as different equities were represented. I did not have any meetings with Sheryl on the paper, but I can’t speak to whether she was in the loop with my higher-ups.
In the end, the difficult question of attribution was settled by us pointing to the DNI report instead of saying Russia or GRU directly. In my pre-briefs with members of Congress, I made it clear that we believed this action was GRU.