I went through the notes on this post specifically to find this reply - or one like it. Because it has a point, and itβs a decent point for you, the person. But itβs also missing the info of the larger scale problem.
(Or it isnβt; as you rightly point out in the tags, itβs a capitalism problem. But Iβll expand on this point of βcapitalismβ. I need to rant. I need to scream.)
Iβm a professional translator. I work in video games and software, with an occasional dash of literary translation. Iβve worked in translation proper, Iβve worked on editing other peopleβs work, Iβve led a couple of translator teams. Iβve worked the occasional miracle, working around some Really Dumb Choices the developers made.
(Spoiler alert: other languages have different syntax and grammar, if you give me a list of nouns to translate, and then give me the plural βsβ to translate separately, this is not good. Even in English, woman -> womans is dumb.)
I am a fan of making things affordable and accessible. I am really happy that Google Translate and similar things can tell me the gist of what people are saying in conversations I only half care about. As the poster above says, itβs great! Not perfect, but ok!
Do you know whatβs not great? Do you know what the OP in the original image means?
The client the original image is talking about isnβt you. Itβs not some person on the internet trying to find out what someone said in a Post. The client theyβre talking about is, essentially, the corporation: the translation agency, the publishing house, the IT giant.
You, the individual, do not have the power to demand how I do my job. If you come to me and say, βSarshi, I want you to take this 300-word post, run it through Google Translate, and then charge me half of what you usually do for translating itβ, I can take it or leave it.
But I get contacted by agencies - half of them want this. βWe have a game, Sarshi! Just post-edit the results of a machine translation!β βWe have support articles, Sarshi! Weβre paying you a lot less to post-edit the results of machine translation!β
You say itβs ok to have 80% accuracy, and I feel you! Yes, sometimes it is! But companies are like βlol, this worksβ, too!
Itβs happening over and over. And these arenβtβ¦ theyβre not people, you know? Theyβre not Auntie May trying to figure out what the dough recipe she got from her niece in Indonesia says. Theyβre agencies, trying to increase their earnings by promising top quality to companies, then going, βgosh, we said weβd do it for cheap, how can we manage that?β
Or they can even be large companies themselves. Oh, youβve spent a bajillion trillion dollars trying to create the CryptoNFTVirtualRealityAI hybrid that everybody knew wouldnβt work and now you panic because your earnings are lower than usual? Oh, and you want to βcut costsβ by screwing over every contractor you have? Great. Just great.
This is going to screw you over - you, the individual. Not my client, not the translatorβs client in general - the companyβs client. The corporation is too big to really care about how you feel about their product - the employees individually might, but the companyβs only metric is if you buy it or not. And the company makes decisions based on what brings the most money for the least cost.
So your hardware manuals might be crap and you might be in tears because you have no idea how to make your new appliance do the thing. Youβll go on YouTube and youβll find a solution, and youβll eventually figure it out. And maybe youβll forget about the crap manual in time. So next time, they still wonβt get a good translator, because they already have a cheaper solution that seems to work.
So your game looks like it was translated by a bunch of rats in a bunker and you can barely understand what anyoneβs saying? Well, maybe they got a bottom-feeding agency overpromise that they totally have legit translators working for $1/hour. Pinky swear! Did you buy the game? You did. Soβ¦ the system worked! Theyβll hire the same agency again!
Itβs like the clothing industry all over again. We could have better clothes, but itβs cheaper not to. Theyβre doing us a service by selling us shoes that wonβt last a season, and T-shirts that will look like crap after washing them twice - theyβre cheap, arenβt they? Theyβre affordable. Anyone can get clothes. (So you pay more in time are are more frustrated? Whoβs counting!)
And meanwhile, itβs easy to forget things might be different. That we have the ability to create good things, pleasant things. That manuals can be easily readable, that games can sound great, that books can be awesome to read. It becomes harder to trust the market, harder to believe in quality, easier to say that this is normal, this is how things just are.
And if you speak English natively, wellβ¦ Youβre at a huge advantage. A lot of stuff is created by your people, for you. For countries like mine, that are small enough to import a lot, nearly everything is translated. I want you to imagine almost all movies subbed, every appliance made elsewhere (with menus needing translated and all), every app in a foreign language. And everybody who can cut costs will try to.
Itβs notβ¦ itβs not great.
prguitarman
turnnoffyourmind
kianamaiart
pixelskylines
