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John Fossey Kanada Local time: 22:39 Tag (2008 óta) francia - angol + ...
CAT tools are not Machine Translation
Mar 21, 2012
Lidia Morejudo wrote:
George Trail wrote:
Am I right in thinking that this "post-editing" I keep hearing so much about in translation job offers in ProZ and TranslatorsCafe is just something that follows people running a whole document through a machine translator wothout giving a toss about the content of the document until after it's all done? Good Lord!
Yes. Well, the ones I've seen are run through a tool like Trados or Wordfast. But some of the comments above are right, generally the end product is so meaningless that you really have to type the whole thing from scratch.
Please don't mix up Computer Aided Translation with Machine Translation. They are two totally different things.
Trados and Wordfast are CAT tools and you can't "run" a document "through" a CAT tool. A CAT tool will present the translator with the document to be translated segment by segment and search through it's memory to determine if the translator has ever translated that segment before, and if so offer it as a possibility. The translator generally still has to work on each segment. It's primary advantage is really in organizing the work, maintaining uniform terminology throughout a project and helping avoid errors and missed segments.
Machine Translation is completely different. A "corpus" of potentially billions of pages of previously translated documents from bodies such as the United Nations or EU governments is analyzed statistically to determine the likelihood of words being combined in a certain sequence, to produce what bears a resemblance to a translation, but really isn't. The computer knows nothing about the meaning, only statistics. This is what is meant by "running a document through machine translation".
[Edited at 2012-03-21 03:09 GMT]
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