Making a Case Against Machine Translation (6/23投稿記事「脱・機械翻訳のすすめ」の英訳）
Machine translation was once something that produced humorously strange or inaccurate results. However, recently, it has made great bounds in accuracy and is much more widely used. The strong points of machine translation are speed and cost. There are completely free options available. However, from my perspective as a professional translator, the following issues still remain:
- Security (As for free machine translation services, all information can be seen and used by others outside of your company)
- Inconsistency (For a single word, several translations are used within the same document): (Very common)
- Untranslated text (Words, phrases, or even entire sentences left untranslated) : (Somewhat common)
- Mistranslations (The result ends up having a different or complete opposite meaning than the original text): (Somewhat common)
- Unnatural vocabulary or grammar: (Somewhat common to very common)
Therefore, if you are working with documents the contents of which you are okay with being made accessible to those outsides of your company, need something cheap and quickly, simply want to translate something as a reference for yourself or your company, or the like, then machine translation should not be much of a problem. If you are dealing with confidential information, a project with no room for error, or for translating documents that will be sent outside your company, I recommend not using machine translation.
