Can Machine Translation Stand Alone?

As mentioned in a previous commentary, translation is beyond the transfer of superficial meaning, but many arguments still only focus on this and its accuracy.

A machine translation service provider reports that the rapid development of technology will make machine translation more accurate and human translators may lose their jobs. An engineering scientist even warned that people will not pay for a translation service once machine translation accuracy is around 90 percent. However, these arguments are partially flawed in that they do not consider how the machine translation engine works and its impact on how translation is created and used.

First, it is necessary to differentiate day-to-day communication from business communication. Casual communication, such as reading machine translated Twitter feeds or reviews of hospitality services, can accept 10 percent inaccuracy, as long as the core message is delivered.

In the business context, however, 10 percent inaccuracy can pose huge financial and reputational risks. To make matters more complicated, current machine translation uses the neural network, which has been known as the "black box." Therefore, no one can predict exactly in which sentence or which part of a sentence the machine translation will make errors. Even worse, it is extremely difficult to pinpoint which part of a neural network is responsible for the error. Of course, if there is any industry that can tolerate this random high risk, human translators will have no choice but to leave the industry.

So what should be done to mitigate this innate risk of machine translation?

The outcome of machine translation needs to be corrected with well-trained human translators and this new type of translation work process is called MTPE (Machine Translation Post Editing). MTPE is emerging in the industry and many...