Monday I gladly excepted an MTPE project for a luxury car brand.

Well, I always gladly except a job, there’s nothing new to that.

But it turned out to be two days of hard work. I was a bit surprised that I felt a bit empty after the first day.

As usual with this kind of MTPE jobs you wonder why it does feel so hard, because there wasn’t a lot to translate and the vocabulary problems had mostly been taken care off.

However, first of all it was an anormous amount of words: more than 166 000! Luckily, I only had to take a look at approximately 10 000.

But, oh boy: the AI didn’t take the TB into account! All of that had to be checked afterwards.

And one or other program – maybe the AI too – replaced all words written in capitals by tags. That was very interesting for combinations like “the STOP button”, but it replaced “OFF” and “ON” from phrasal verbs by tags too.

That meant “Tun ON” and “Turn OFF” looked exactly the same. It all became “Turn TAG1”.

But the translation “Zet TAG1” would have ended up as “Zet OFF” or “Zet ON”, which can hardly be called Dutch.
Every occurrence of phrasal verbs had to be checked to be make it was translated OK. Things like that make MTPE more time-consuming than expected, and meeting the deadline can be a headache.

I pulled it off, but it became clear why MTPE can feel so unexpectedly tiring.