Maand: januari 2026

Learning with AI

Learning using AI and computers in general tends to be cutting corners and diminishing the effort one has to do. Because of it the learner has less direct experience with the thing he learns, which means he doesn’t learn as well. Maybe he notices he understands the subject, but the question is: will he remember enough of it? Will he actually “gain” something with it?

I have been learning Japanese by using software, offline and online, and although the learning process went smooth, my feeling was that I hadn’t learned anything which helped me in real situations.

Obviously, real situations are less standardized than a computer setting tends to be, and that’s why there isn’t enough variety in the learning process. The learning result is therefore not elastic enough to apply in real situations.

Three source languages is overdone. Or is it?

To lots of people it sounds overdone: “Three source languages: German, English and French”.
Wouldn’t it be better to stick to one?
But combined with Dutch the picture changes.
Lots of companies use internally more than one language, and as the Netherlands are surrounded by regions in which those three languages play an important role, their companies also tend to use two to three of those languages.
That’s why those three source languages are ideally suited to help out businesses, because their documents often need all of those languages, and not only one.
Therefore have German, English and French as source languages gives my services an ideal position to help out companies, whether it’s for their internal documents or for their costumer oriented documents, in Belgium and in the Netherlands.

Automated translations for automated mistakes: is it possible?

AI is everywhere.
The odd thing is it looks to me as if people just got recently aware of it although as a translator we have been using it for years.
The translation systems became gradually more clever. Because of that, there’s nothing new to it.
Unfortunately, what isn’t new either, is the simplistic views held by outsiders on automation.
Only yesterday I was in touch with somebody who thought it was possible to translate 400 pages for a mere 200 euro’s from English to Dutch. Did they really not see that 0.50 euro’s/page isn’t feasable for any system, however automated and advanced it is?
But the real problem is some believe you can do away with translators altogether.
Lately I found a website of one of my endclients, which obviously didn’t send all his texts via my agent to me, because there was a mistake on the home page, even in bold text. An adverb was treated as a noun. It’s a word, or rather a phrase, which is very tricky in Dutch because of the spelling differences for the two meanings.
I was flabbergasted and researched all the work I had already done for them, and didn’t find it in any file. It was clearly something they had done by using MT or AI. And, of course, the automated systems didn’t notice the differences.
I even noticed a second mistake, which also was the result of automated translation systems, in that case a problem by using a CAT tool. Although such systems can be very useful, they often hide differences which pop up because pieces of translations are glued together. But in changing the lingustic context by making new sentences putting together parts of old sentences or combining parts of old sentences with other words, those parts often have to be changed.
Worse is that it was on a website which promotes judicial actions, and I wonder how people are going to trust a company offering that kind of actions if you see mistakes on the home page. Cutting out the human in the loop causes mistakes by which you lose clients, revenue and support.