My Conversations with ChatGPT
Machine Translation (MT) and translations generated by AI have brought about a paradigm shift in the translation industry. The output of MT will continue to improve, especially when associated with clients’ translation memories and human editing. Language Service Providers are adapting and are including MT in their processes, when MT is applicable. While linguists will continue to be essential in the process, their role will shift from that of translators to validators of content generated by MT. At Excel Translations, we wanted to know what AI thinks about all of this and decided to have an open conversation on the matter with ChatGPT. I will regularly publish a question and ChatGPT’s response, uncensored.
QUESTION 4:
Has the amount of time translators take to edit MT output been declining?
ChatGPT’s response:
Yes, the amount of time that translators spend editing machine translation (MT) output has generally been decreasing over time. As MT systems improve and become more accurate, the post-editing process becomes more efficient.
In the early stages of MT development, the output generated by MT systems often required significant editing and revision by human translators to achieve an acceptable level of quality. Translators would spend a considerable amount of time reworking the MT output to ensure accuracy, fluency, and adherence to specific style or domain requirements.
However, as MT systems have advanced, particularly with the introduction of neural machine translation (NMT) models, the quality of the initial MT output has improved. NMT models have shown better fluency, better preservation of meaning, and a reduced number of glaring errors compared to older statistical machine translation (SMT) systems.
This improvement in MT quality has led to a reduction in the time required for post-editing. Translators now spend less time on basic error correction and focus more on refining the output, ensuring proper terminology, adapting style, and addressing more complex linguistic and cultural aspects. This shift has resulted in increased productivity and faster turnaround times for translators.
Additionally, some translation tools and platforms have integrated features specifically designed to streamline the post-editing process. These tools provide user-friendly interfaces for translators to make edits directly within the MT output, improving efficiency and reducing the time spent on formatting or reworking the translations.
While the exact time reduction can vary depending on the specific MT system, language pair, and text complexity, the trend suggests that translators now spend less time editing MT output compared to earlier stages of MT development. However, it’s important to note that the editing time can still vary significantly based on the quality of the MT output and the desired level of refinement for the specific project.
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