Free translation is good, but…

Free professional Japanese translation is best!

The world is your oyster – There’s a plethora of machine translation vendors “touting” their wares as cutting edge, capable of producing professional grade translation.

The question that needs to be asked, though, is what about the efficacy of these wares.

Does the hype match the reality?

We have the answers for you!

SAECULII Y.K. (Tokyo, Japan) has every four years over the past decade been running a series of experiments to:

• Test the efficacy of machine translation (MT), and
• Gauge improvement in the technology.

Let me be the first to point out that the experiment is hardly scientific; however, the methodology is transparent, and the results speak for themselves.

Machine Translation Experiment Methodology

The experiment is very simple and straightforward.

We took a passage from the following business article:

As Kindle Fire Faces Critics, Remedies Are Promised
(Yahoo!, 2011-12-14)

We ran the passage through machine translation:

1. English-to-Japanese Translation (i.e., translate to get Japanese text), then
2. Japanese-to-English Translation (i.e., reverse translate back to English text).

Why do we reverse the translation?

The thinking is that if machine translation is any good -efficacy- the reverse translation should be the same, or very similar, to the original English passage. This approach will help folks that do not speak Japanese determine for themselves just how good machine translation is.

Does Machine Translation Produce Professional Japanese Translation?

A decade is a long time and given the acceleration of technology development it would not be unreasonable to expect positive results from these experiments. Click on a link to view the results for a particular year:

• 2011 – Take 1: Babel Fish Online Translator
• 2015 – Take 2: Google Translate
• 2019 – Take 3: …
• 2023 – Take 4: Microsoft Translator

(Although this article series has been re-arranged for flow and readability, the original content has not changed.)

The reason why we devised this experiment was to convince clients, who were demanding machine translation to realize cost savings, that the technology was simply not there yet. A decade plus later, I would have to say that from a professional translation perspective

The technology is still simply not there yet.

The introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) into the technology has been a game changer. However, as seen from the results above, I personally and -more importantly- professionally would not use machine translation for anything serious!

(When machine translation can truly compete with human translation, I will be the first to hang up my translation spurs…)

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About the Author
Ivan Vandermerwe is the CEO of SAECULII YK, owner of Japan, Tokyo based Japanese Translation Company Visit SAECULII for the latest professional case studies, articles and news on Japanese Translation Services

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