jimbo Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6296 days ago 469 posts - 642 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Japanese, Latin
| Message 17 of 63 22 June 2011 at 5:33am | IP Logged |
TixhiiDon wrote:
translator2 wrote:
Good freelance translators in the U.S. make between 80,000 and
100,000 a year. |
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Good freelance translators in Japan can make double that, and more. I don't know where this myth of the poverty-
stricken translator, scrabbling to make a living, came from. |
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I'd be happy to be wrong about my earlier comment about translators not getting paid what they are worth.
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Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6705 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map
| Message 18 of 63 22 June 2011 at 7:58am | IP Logged |
I do think that translators (and later maybe also interpreters) have reason to be worried. There will still be a need for high standard translating, but when the alternative is a free machine translation what will then happen? I'm fairly sure that standards demanded of translations will be lowered, and often the job will be left to the customer who of course won't pay for a human translator.
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crystal.yang Newbie United Kingdom Joined 4913 days ago 25 posts - 39 votes Speaks: Mandarin
| Message 19 of 63 22 June 2011 at 8:03am | IP Logged |
I don't think you should be worried now. The google translator can not translate accurate. When it translates a pieces of article, many mistakes will be found in the result .
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crafedog Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5820 days ago 166 posts - 337 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Korean, Tok Pisin, French
| Message 20 of 63 22 June 2011 at 8:14am | IP Logged |
I asked this exact same question the other day
here
I do think European languages-English pairings could be in trouble. Something like
Japanese/Korean/Arabic/Chinese should be safe for longer but the advances of technology
translation should not be scoffed at. I've used a few completely free translators (on
Google Chrome) and they've been disturbingly accurate. Idioms, expressions everything.
They were better than me and any dictionaries I looked through which is unnerving.
For your problem specifically, I'd say focus on Interpreting rather than Translating.
That will take far longer to replace/replicate with sufficient technical ability.
Edited by crafedog on 22 June 2011 at 8:22am
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christian Senior Member United States Joined 5252 days ago 111 posts - 135 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese, German
| Message 21 of 63 22 June 2011 at 8:38am | IP Logged |
I don't really know much about the profession of translating, but I do know that a lot of manuals, labels, signs, etc
use those online translators. I can easily spot it when looking at an instruction booklet, recipe, or even a store sign.
So maybe the commercial sector is a no-go for translators?
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Wompi Triglot Groupie Germany Joined 4958 days ago 56 posts - 64 votes Speaks: German*, Spanish, English Studies: Czech
| Message 22 of 63 22 June 2011 at 9:03am | IP Logged |
Perhaps with English you can get some good results but the level of translation I think is still to low to worry.
For other european languages there is still a long way to go for e.g. gTranlslate. I used it for a short time, translating a book from czech to German and from what I can say it is in 60%-70% just wrong. There are many mistaken words and the grammar is horrible. Though it is good for getting a grasp on what the sentence may mean :)
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jean-luc Senior Member France Joined 4962 days ago 100 posts - 150 votes Speaks: French* Studies: German
| Message 23 of 63 22 June 2011 at 10:13am | IP Logged |
For the moment you're reasonably safe, peoples who can afford a translator, cannot afford a (too) bad translation. But it's true that automatic translator are becoming better and better, but by the time they become a threat for you they'll become a threat for a lot more people than translator.
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kenshin Triglot Newbie Taiwan Joined 5032 days ago 17 posts - 34 votes Speaks: Taiwanese, Mandarin*, English Studies: Japanese, German, French
| Message 24 of 63 22 June 2011 at 10:24am | IP Logged |
Sorry if this is not directly related to the topic, I am curious about whether the
quality of translation by software would vary from language families.
For example, would you get a better translation result from "English <->
Dutch/German/Swedish" than "English <-> Arabic/Japanese/Turkish" ? Or you would get a
better result of English translation (in contrary to languages less studied) no matter
what the languages you translate from?
Also, I agree that free translation softwares are not aimed at replacing professional
human translation services. Many of my friends use Google translator when they encounter
any website without Chinese version, and the translation is not pleasant to read,
actually.
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