English to French translation

Proofreading machine translation

February 22, 2007

I have just received an email starting like this:

Dear translator,
We are looking for translators with experience in UE and official institutions texts for an EU tender. This job consists on the proofreading of UE text generated by machine translation.

I didn’t go any further. Hopefully, this isn’t a sign of things to come for translators. Spending my days turning machine-generated nonsense into decent French, at a much reduced rate? No, thanks.

Comments

You don't say from whom this came. Judging by the way it is written it must be a scam of some kind.
But I suppose it's just possible that the EU has actually put some of this sort of work out for tender; if so they will get no responses from professional agencies so in desperation they might give the work to the sort of outfit (one man with an internet connection?) who sent out this try-on in the hope of assembling a list of translators to make their bid sound impressive.

It's not a scam, it was sent by a company that offers, among other things, "language solutions".

A company involved in the translation busines that can't write English?

My guess is it takes more time (and it is therefore more expensive) to turn a machine translation into a decent translation than to have it translated from scratch by a real translator...

Was it from a Greek agency by any chance? I do know that quite a lot of Greek companies have specialised in translating large volumes of EU documents, and that they use a lot of MT to undercut the competition. As the Commission doesn't seem to be interested in translation quality any more, it's no doubt a lucrative business for these agencies (even if they evidently struggle to write a simple sentence in English).

Percy's comment is spot-on for a lot of MT output, but the new generation of (very expensive) MT systems, such as Language Weaver, produce a far higher quality of output than older systems (and many translators, to be honest). Not enough to get me worried, but things may look a bit different five years down the line.

UE does not use MT, unless in the way that appears here. It sounds more like "we want you to work like a dumm". I was on a conference given by the Chief of the Spanish service of Translation in the Comission, and they sound too much professional to take MT seriously...

The EU tender document contains a couple of references to example raw machine translations in all source/target combinations of English, French and German.
So the EU is not a promising source of work for a self-respecting freelancer. Nothing new about that.

I've just received another email from a different translation agency asking me to participate in the same tender... fight fight fight!

Thanks a lot for the link Victor, the translation is very interesting: it goes from decent sentences ("La production agricole durable doit également refléter les préoccupations des consommateurs, en ce qui concerne plus particulièrement la qualité, la sécurité et les méthodes de production traditionnelles/organiques.") to truly shocking ones ("Au coeur de la Communauté la stratégie agro-environnementale dans la PAC est des mesures ciblées qui récompensent des agriculteurs pour les services environnementaux dans les zones rurales, au-delà des pratiques agricoles bonnes et de la législation environnementale."). It wouldn't be an editing job, but a rewriting job, which would indeed take longer than translating from scratch.

RobinB, I wonder whether this particular translation was done using one of the advanced tools you mention... and I share your opinion that 5 years down the line, such programs could well be able to handle "non-creative", "simple" technical texts.

The subject of MT post-editing has been discussed several times on ProZ. One of the main proponents is Jeff Allen. In one of the discussions he included a link to somebody's thesis on the subject, and one of the points made there is that post-editors must be instructed not to do too much rewriting and not to impose their own style.
In other words, if you don't hate words and writing before you start, you certainly will after you've done it for a day or two.
Oh well, back to my complicated suite of GER-ENG contracts on an international construction deal. I don't expect any MT program to come along and understand this stuff before the end of the current millennium.

I got this e-mail - once every few days - from the same Spanish translation agency over the course of around two weeks. They phoned me up too, and I naturally told them I wasn't interested. Something tells me they're having a hard time finding people prepared to do such work. I, too, sincerely hope this isn't a sign of things to come.

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