No Machine Translation

Our website contains the phrase “no machine translation” displayed prominently on the home page. Client occasionally ask us if we use machine translation for our projects. We do not and we want prospective clients to know.

Why Is Machine Translation Used By Some?

Machine translation (that is, translation of text performed solely by a computer) is of interest for two main reasons:

1) It’s faster. Large volumes of text can be translated much more quickly by machines compared to human translators.

2) It’s cheaper. Machine translation can be performed at a fraction of the cost of human translation. The marginal costs for translations are close to zero for producers.

Nowhere on the list of advantages of machine translations would we expect to find “higher quality translations.”

Human Translation Quality Assurance

Affinity Translation works within its network of skilled human professional translators to ensure that all translation projects adhere to processes that promote high quality translations. Post-translation proofreading by a second translators is a quality assurance step automatically built-in to our translation rates. The use of translators that are native speaking in the target language is another practice employed to promote high quality translations.

Some companies offers categories of translation services performed by machine as an option. Some companies offer hybrid machine/human translations. Human translators are tasked to edit the output of machine translations to make them acceptable.

So the option to the client then becomes: a) would you prefer a high quality human translation performed by skilled linguists, or b) would you prefer a machine translation (or machine/human hybrid translation) that’s less expensive, available more quickly, but lower in quality?

So which will it be?