Sunday, July 08, 2012

Translation Tools


I’m a low-tech translator. I use my knowledge, dictionaries, other reference works, the internet, translation networks, and other contacts in order to translate.

But I know that a lot of other translators rely on tools. I don’t, in part because I think they actually require quite a bit of work that makes them not quite worthwhile. But here’s a link to a short piece on translation tools. I don’t agree with the list (people are needed for much more than the final draft!), but it’s interesting to see where non-language professionals think our field is going.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I’m glad you wrote that. I'm a low-tech translator, too - and proud of it. Good luck!

Sarai Pahla said...

In my experience, a machine will never be able to replace a human translation - but then again, human translations can differ so much between each other in quality that one can't really argue the point with conviction. Some human translation output is worse than machine translation output. I'm interested to see what the future holds.

Anonymous said...

It's a common idea that word to word translation never looks good, and does not make any proper sense! You could hardly expect any quality translation using any language translation tools. The innovative thinking, quality presentation with meaningful translation can definitely be expected from human being. But of course it depends upon experience, expertise etc. So result may vary from person to person.

Unknown said...

I agree with you. I'm a low-tech translator, too.