Long story short, Takeda Random House dabbled in machine translation on a published works leading to a devastating recall. Here’s the complete article for those interested in the minute:
Machine translation forces major Japanese publishing company into bankruptcyInterestingly enough, though, this article only gained traction when it was re-blogged 18 months later, in January 2015. Numerous comments flowed as interest in the article peaked. These comments, in-and-of-themselves, speak volumes as to the tug-of-war going on in the translation industry that continues to this day -- There is value in reproducing some of these comments to illustrate this point.
MARIA RIGLI
Machine translation should not be confused with computer-assisted translation. Surely, nothing can replace human translators.
Nancy Matis
Crazy story. I can't read the full article in Japanese - but I guess those machine-translated texts were at least post-edited before being published...I can understand the use of MT in some sectors but in this case, I have some doubts...
Nellie K. Adaba
I'm sorry, I meant to say machine or automatic translation, or translation memories cannot replace us human translators. I messed up, made a mistake, malapropism.
Marvin Taylor
We all make mistakes like that. While I think machine translation might be faster and more multichanneled than human translation, it never gets the "feel" of human translation, 'tis true. It seldom gets the nuances as well as human translation when one goes between languages. Therefore we all agree: machine translation cannot replace human translation.
Maria Ortiz Takacs, trad. a./C. Tr.
Wow, it's hard to believe that a reputable publishing company would be so sloppy!
Mohammad Sinaei
I think we should use both human and machine translators. Some time machines translators are useful (for typing faster) but sometime human is the best option.(make fewer mistakes). All in all, I think both have pros and cons.
Cheers
Summarizing, while there’s agreement machine translation can’t produce the natural translation quality of human translators, a number of glaring issues may be a sign of the times:
- General confusion as to what constitutes machine translation – Beef up on the different types of translation here
- Blame the user (“sloppy”), not the (machine translation) tool
- Approval of machine translation, having both pros & cons and depending on translation field
Free Professional Japanese Translation is Still a...Pipe Dream
While we don’t endorse any of the comments above, our position is that machine translation (MT) -being a software that is nowhere near ready for prime time- is being irresponsibly pushed by commercial interest as an alternative to professional human translation.
I say “irresponsibly” because many folks have come to believe the marketing spin, to their own detriment. For example,
We had a client out of Sri Lanka that needed a machine translated website re-done with professional Japanese translation. The client, not being knowledgeable in matters of translation was led to believe that machine translation would suffice -- They paid 75% over-and above the professional translation solution we provided?!
Of course, as a Japanese Translation Services company specializing in human translation, we bring a certain measure of bias to the discussion. Why don’t you decide for yourself the efficacy of machine translation - Read
Finally, in recent years machine translation has become synonymous with artificial intelligence (AI), large language models, neural networks and deep learning. Limited improvements, to be sure, have been made in quality; however, machine translation is still just that – machine translation.
And, oh, let us know what you think - Your 2 cents deposited in the comments section would be appreciated!
