Tag: translation

AI is a slotmachine

Based on experience my colleague Markéta Brožová Hanelová said: “As for interpreting, I don’t think this profession will be easily erased, but similarly to translation, the developments are not driven by the rising AI-translation quality, but rather by clients willing to take risks in exchange for huge savings.”

A recent example of errors by AI is “Ich have Erfahrung mit Didaktik und Sprachlernmaterialien”. “I have” was translated by “Ich have” instead of “Ich habe”.

Some people think the AI does that to mark it as an AI translation. But those markings use special combinations of successive synonyms, not mistakes.
It’s a mystery why it came up with “Ich have”.

A translation with a CAT tool or even with MT wouldn’t do that, because what you have entered correctly in CAT or MT will be reproduced correctly. AI is trained on an enormous amount of source material, and should not come up with “Ich have”. The volume of material would average out mistakes like that. Theoretically, that is.

You could argue that the blunder is easy to notice, but there are a few problems.

First of all, the types of mistakes AI makes are clearly unpredictable. It could be anything, and therefore it demands extra attention. Not only are there seemingly easy to notice problems, but you could also be tackled by mistakes in specialised vocabulary. And that’s tricky business.

Secondly, the user cannot trust AI if one of the two languages is unknown to him. You still have to be good in the source and the target language, because otherwise you’re going to miss errors. And on top of that, you also have to know the specialised vocabulary in both languages, which is especially treacherous because different terms might superficially be the same, whereas they aren’t in reality.

Basically all problems stem from the fact that AI does not reason, but gambles when it chooses words. It’s based on the most frequent occurrences of word combinations, not on the meaning, because it doesn’t understand things.

Positive reaction from a client

It are difficult times to find new clients, and the volume from older clients tends to diminish too.

Therefore I asked one of them whether I got the jobs during August because my colleagues were on a vacation, as I started to ask myself if I did something wrong, or whether the quality of my work went down.

The involved project manager answered:

“I can’t tell for other PMs, but for me personally, you are one of my first choices 😊 You reply quickly, consistently deliver good-quality translations, you’re flexible when it comes to deadlines, and your rate is competitive. So the recent jobs weren’t simply because other translators were on vacation – I’m very happy to work with you and will continue reaching out whenever I have suitable projects for you.

Best regards,

Barbara S.” (full name deleted for privacy reasons)

I translate for them from English to Dutch, and usually it’s about heavy mobile equipment.

The disappointment of AI translations

My most popular message to date on LinkedIn mentioned the problem of working on AI generated translations: it is very exhausting, and the main problem is that it takes more time than the managers seem to think.

I’m not the first translator who says that an AI generated target sentence often has to be rebuild from scratch. Not only because of mistakes, but primarily because the mistakes are spread in such an odd way in the sentence, that it costs more time to stick to correcting the mistakes in the sentence, than to translate from scratch.

If you take the AI translation as a base to work from, you have to read and reread the source and compare it again and again with the target, because the content of the original can be ordered completely different in the target. If the translator wouldn’t do that, the result could be difficult to read, and wouldn’t even sound as the target language. Hence the extra work.

It’s one of the major disappointments about AI translations. I think we’ve hit the limit of gain in time that automation can give us.

donderdag 2 april – vrijdag 10 april 2026

Still going strong for long-standing client

It is so long ago, that I barely remember when I started translating for them. ‘Them’ is a huge company manufacturing heavy building machinery, like excavators and tools such as tilt-rotators.
According to my archives it all began in 2009. In those days I translated off-line, although I had already been working on-line on tractor manuals.
The translation memories became more important, and the system used them more intelligently. Someday off-line changed to on-line for that company too. I helped them making the program a bit more clever, and nowadays we call it MPTE: machine translation – proof editing, the terminology we use in the translation industry for working with artificial intelligence.
The documents are safety instructions, user manuals, maintenance instructions, montage and demontage instructions, and so on.
Apart from the growing involvement of MPTE, there was also the increase of software used in the machines. Luckily I once was an apprentice Cobol programmer/analyst, and I had some interest in computers and programming. As a matter of fact, I build my own website around 2000, when blogs didn’t exist yet. Unfortunately that website is defunct nowadays. But my ICT background still helps a lot, especially because car technology without software has become unthinkable.
More than 15 years is indeed a longstanding client. That record won’t be broken easily.

building #machinery #excavator #tiltrotator #tractor #safety #instructions #manuals #maintenance #montage #demontage

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.

Changing words

Remember the days when the web was young and people in the Netherlands called a ‘website’ a ‘webstek’?

The word didn’t catch on, but others did, like ‘koekje’ for ‘cookie’, although it’s not very general.

And homepage… That’s an odd one. Often one just writes ‘home’, and in that case almost nobody prefers a Dutch version. ‘Thuispagina’, however, is used, Although a search on Dutch language sites with domain name .nl reveals more than a billion occurrences of the word ‘homepage’, I doubt the validity of those search results. The Netherlands have only approximately 17 million inhabitants. Those figures suggest 75 web pages per inhabitant. Now, that’s not entirely impossible, but it is astonishing.

In general it looks as if Dutch coinages for web terminology didn’t really catch on, but that doesn’t mean you should altogether avoid them when translating, because it’s a way for a company to build its brand and character.

Some words did catch on, like ‘afdrukken’ for ‘to print’.

So it’s not only a matter of looking in a dictionary or putting everything in the hands of some AI. Remember when InterNet was spelled? Which became Internet, and finally plain internet? One has to notice such stuff, and it’s not purely a matter of statistics.

Talk it through with your translator, or make sure you can trust him he chooses what suites your company, personality or target audience.

#translation #motte #TranslationAgency #localization

vrijdag 25 april 2025

Translation Agency Motte – 9

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