Some clients asked if I can promise them that I do not use machine translation at all. My usual response is that I do not trust machine translation at all, and all works are done by me. When I bring some fellow translators / business writers on board, as the editor I monitor the quality of work. And I only work with writers who also commit to 100% human work.

Even for computer-assisted translation (CAT), I find those tools to be quite annoying. This is because longer documents are broken down into split sentences and the translator has to work on the text sentence by sentence. The good thing about this is that one might find it faster to complete sentence by sentence, instead of paragraph by paragraph. The shortcoming is that you can’t see the whole picture of the text.

Another problem is that the term base saves and memorises bilingual terms. The system suggests the term in another language when it identifies one. But the problem is, business writers wish to use different terms to enrich the language style so that the text doesn’t look rigid.

A better solution is to prepare a file of bilingual terms. Microsoft Excel and OpenDocument Spreadsheet (ODS) are good helpers for me to build up terms for both Chinese and English languages. To ensure a quality translation / transcription work, I make sure I always refer to my terms bank to keep my wording consistent.

For clients who still trust and appreciate 100% human translation, please feel free to email and discusss with us your project: keith@keithyeow.com

可否完全避免使用機器翻譯,有些客戶詢問我。我完全不相信機器翻譯,文件通常是我獨力完成。這是我給他們的答覆。若我需要找其他譯者/商業文案寫手幫忙,我身為編輯就會好好監督文案的品質。我也祇跟完全相信人類翻譯的寫手合作。

我有時候覺得電腦輔助翻譯(CAT)還蠻厭煩的。CAT通常將長文拆散成分開的一個個句子,譯者需要一句句翻譯。這做法的好處可能是譯者會感覺比較快完成工作,因為處理長段落感覺上需要比較耗時。缺點就是譯者無法看到整篇文章的大局。

詞彙庫儲存、記憶雙語用字亦是一個問題。通常這些系統偵測到同一詞彙就會建議目標語文的詞彙。問題在於,商業文案寫手通常想使用不同詞彙,好讓文章的語文風格看起來更豐富,而不是死氣沉沉。

一個比較好的解決方法就是自己準備雙語詞彙庫。微軟Excel和Open Office 的ODS一直都是我的好幫手,我通常用ODS建立中英文詞彙庫。我時常參考自己的中英文詞彙庫以確保譯文用字穩定,進而保持翻譯和謄寫水準。

各地的客戶若依然信任、珍視百分之百人類翻譯,歡迎來信討論新案子:keith@keithyeow.com