One Hour Translation Blog

Machine translation is fast becoming the wave of the future for the translation field thanks to innovations like the Google Transliteration IME. Granted, human translation will probably remain as the dominant translation system thanks to the limitations of our present translation technology and the inimitable capabilities of the human mind, but the sheer handiness of this type of software is still something of note.

Even though machine translation still couldn’t beat the accuracy of the bilingual-to-multilingual staff of professional translation firms or the per-word economy of translation service freelancers, the Google … Continue Reading

Technology has been inevitably remodeling the practice and concept of human translation in many aspects—so much so that machine translation has become an integral part of the professional translation process. Sure, human translation remains the best method of choice when it comes to providing topnotch translation services, but that’s not to say that machine translation is completely useless. For instance, instead of leafing through thousands upon thousands of dictionary pages when looking for a certain word or phrase translation, you can now rely exclusively on a computer to find these words … Continue Reading

Today translation has turned out to be one of the key tools to have a better understanding of different cultures and in past couple of years has gained its recognition worldwide. However, looking at the present scenario translation service can be broadly categorized into two categories, namely:

Translation can be defined as an act of interpretation of the meaning of a content and consequent re-production of equivalent content. The content or the text that is required to be translated is called “Source Text” and the language in which the source text is to be … Continue Reading

Google Translate (GT) is a popular translation service provided by Google to translate a word, a phrase, a section of text or an entire web page into one of 51 languages mentioned below. It can even provides translated search i.e. one can search a particular keyword in a source language in the target language websites for content and have it translated back into source language. The keyword is first translated into the target language and then the search is conducted in that language. Once the relevant web pages have been found, it is translated back into … Continue Reading

Professional translation agencies and web-based translation service providers have long been jockeying to provide affordable, cost-effective human translation to their myriad of multinational clients from time immemorial (or at least since the time professional translation became a profitable and worldwide industry). However, offering value-addled translation services is just part of the whole human translation puzzle; something else is in … Continue Reading

Mobile translation is a translation service of the machine variety used to accommodate PDAs, Pocket PCs, and mobile telephones. In turn, mobile phone translation is the type of mobile translation that specifically caters to mobile devices such as Android, Blackberry, and iPhone when it comes to translating their mobile applications. Because this translation service utilizes machine translation instead … Continue Reading

When you have a business and you wish to promote it online, the best way to go about it is create a website, post ads and submit content to other websites. This will help bring traffic to your site which in turn will boost your business and revenues. This has been the most common procedure for almost anyone who wants to boost their business. This is a good reliable procedure no doubt, but when you have a website that caters to the speakers of one language, it happens to limit the traffic that visits your website to the speakers of … Continue Reading

The American human translation industry is quite like many other industries within the country; it has witnessed and experienced some very noticeable, if not altogether radical changes in the past half century or so. The way professional translation firms and freelance translation services have evolved for the last fifty years demonstrates that age-old human translation practices are not immune to the ubiquitous influences of modern technology.

Although machine translation remains too crude for standalone use by professional translation companies, it’s still quite easy to see how technological advances in the field of translation services will cause some … Continue Reading

As many professional translation companies and freelance translation services know, human translation is an act of interpreting the meaning behind a source text so that a faithful reproduction of it—that is, an equivalent text—that communicates the same message in another language could be produced. The original document to be translated is referred to as the source text, while the language that it’s supposed to be converted is called the target language. Ergo, the final product or translated text is occasionally termed the target text as … Continue Reading

Limitations of automatic translation

In the previous part of the article we discussed what machine translation is and here we continue our discussion on the limitations of machine or automatic translation.

Even the most sophisticated software cannot substitute the skill of a professional translator. The reasons why machine translations are not as satisfactory as human translation are many. Ambiguity in translation is the result of one word having many meanings depending on the context. Disambiguation involves use of either shallow approach that uses statistical techniques to remove ambiguity or the deeper approach that involves comprehensive knowledge of a word. The former … Continue Reading

What is automatic translation?

Automatic or machine translation is the use of state of the art technology for translation of a text from one natural language to another without the intervention of human beings. With the advent of digital computers, it usually refers to using software tools that carry out the translation.

The translation process is an inherently complex one and not easily amenable to automation. Translation is not a mere word-for-word substitution. The translator must interpret and analyze all the words in the text and know how each word / sentence influences another. One of … Continue Reading

If weren’t for the superiority of human translation over machine translation, then most companies would be relying on machine translators exclusively. At any rate, multinational enterprises need to realize sooner rather than later that professional translation is an expertise that should never be underestimated.

In general, the art of translation and translation services don’t just depend on word-for-word replacement of a source language text with a target language equivalent. If that were the case, then human translation would be rendered obsolete by machine translation. At the moment though, … Continue Reading