We don’t often recommend other blogs in articles at Tradiling but from time to time it is worth “bumping” some of the great writing that is out there on the web. Kirti Vashee, works at Asia Online, one of the biggest emerging machine translation providers. His blog eMpTy Pages (get it?) on machine translation is one of the most influential in the sector.
Have you ever used Google Translate or Microsoft Bing to get a rough translation and then worked to tidy it up? Essentially, that is what post-editing machine translation is. More and more translation work involves this kind of process, because it is fast and cheap (at the risk of producing gibberish), and in our globalised world there is continuing high demand for translation, even if the funding is not always adequate.
On Saint George’s Day Kirti Vashee published an article on How Translators Can Assess Post-Editing MT Opportunities. As he says, post-editing machine translation (PEMT) “is now just another variant of professional translation work that is much like other translation work, which can be economically advantageous when one is working with the right partners and the right technology.”
Many translators see PEMT as a threat to their livelihood but in the right circumstances it can also be an opportunity.
