Name: John Clyde Perez

1. How do you think the profession of a translator has evolved up to the present time?

Translators have gone from being an all-round translator translating from the
ground up to being a content editor where translation technologies like MT or CAT help
make a translator’s job more efficient by automatically replacing strings of texts which
have been already translated and by saving segments for future use in what they call a
translation memory. This, in turn, allows the translator to concentrate on the essential
things making sure that the end product resonates with a foreign audience as the original
author intended it to.

2. Do you agree with the different opinions expressed by the experts 8 years ago or do
you think that machines will completely cover the role of the translator in the
future? Think for example about those aspects that a machine might not be able to
translate successfully, such as cultural aspects.

Yes. I agree to the opinions expressed by the experts almost a decade ago. I
personally believe that no matter how advance new technologies may get, they will never
be able to perfectly mimic critical thinking, nuance, emotions, humour, affect, and
creativity that are key features in authentic speech, and in which only a human translator
can understand. These machines can be useful tools for translators helping them become
more efficient and productive in their professions, but machines can never replace the
skillsets innate to a human translator.

Reflection: Time is Money

The article basically talks about the truth behind post-editing (PE) in translation industry.
It is proposed that PE is a time-saving strategy for translators; thus, making their jobs a lot easier,
however, this claim is contrary to the reality of the translator’s work since PE demands a
complex decision-making process. In fact, PE may be considered as a more complex task than
translation itself because in medium-quality MT, reading time is increased for the reason that a
decision must be made on whether or not to retain and edit the MT output. Also, as mentioned in
the text, the use of different translation tools would only inundate translators with simultaneous
sources of data that would interfere with their mental processes and slow down their decision-
making skills. Moreover, there are times when translators are faced with conflicting sources of
information and their translation tools do not provide them with enough contexts to resolve the
issue, so in cases like this, they would need to balance the amount of time needed to spend on
each string sometimes devoting time to editing just one word, and sometimes recognising that
the string needs to be fully retranslated. And when time is the most important decision factor, the
translators cannot afford to wonder and waste their time in finding ‘the’ correct alternative to one
word or one string. So with this being said, I personally believe that in order for time to be a
good metric value for translation, the complexity of the tasks the translators are doing should
also be considered since at times when MT fails, the deciding factor will always boil down to the
subjective examination of the text by the translator, and this factor is very difficult to observe
and measure in an objective way, but it undoubtedly contributes to the value of translation as a
whole.