Most people assume they know how translation works. You take the words from one language and make them understandable in another. There are always a few obstacles to achieving a clear understanding, like idioms and differing cultural knowledge bases, but it should be a fairly simple process.
However, when you inquire about having content translated you suddenly understand it’s not at all simple. There are various acronyms commonly used in the translation industry such as ‘HT’, ‘PEMT’ and ‘MT’.
In this article, we will explain human translation, post-edited machine translation and machine translation as simply as possible, and show you how they work in real-world contexts, so you can choose the right solution and vendor for your project.
HT is the oldest form of translation, relying solely on human intelligence and linguistic knowledge to convert one way of saying things to another. It also remains the highest quality form of translation because no machine can quite capture the nuances of language, meaning and culture as well as a professional, experienced human translator. However, technological innovation hasn’t left human translation behind as it has actually taken it to a whole new level with crowd systems.
In a translation agency, a traditional HT process would include full-time or freelance translators working alone or in small groups to manually manage files. However, scaling can be problematic with large projects, which is why technology-leveraged crowd systems use thousands of translators’ working simultaneously on digital texts within a platform that coordinates and manages the project. In addition to reducing the costs of human translation, crowd systems alsohelp solve the scalability issue.
MT is basically what Google Translate does as it’s a software-based process that translates content from one language to another. The problems arise when words have multiple meanings, or different connotations. Linguistic quality and accuracy vary depending on the translation software and how well it’s been fine tuned.
The main benefit is that a machine can do in minutes what would take a human translator many hours to complete, which makes this the least expensive translation method, but the translation quality can vary significantly.
PEMT is used to bridge the gap between the speed of machine translation and the quality of human translation, as translators review, edit and improve machine-translated texts. PEMT services cost more than simple machine translations but less than 100% human translation, especially since the post-editors don’t have to be fluently bilingual, as they only need to be skilled proofreaders with some experience in the language and target region.
Successful translation is about more than simply translating words, which is why we recommend not only human translation by skilled linguists, but also translation by linguistswith life experience, education and knowledge that only comes from living in a particular geographic region, which can make the difference between words that are merely understandable and language that is capable of having a real and long-lasting positive impact.
