I went through the notes on this post specifically to find this reply - or one like it. Because it has a point, and itâs a decent point for you, the person. But itâs also missing the info of the larger scale problem.
(Or it isnât; as you rightly point out in the tags, itâs a capitalism problem. But Iâll expand on this point of âcapitalismâ. I need to rant. I need to scream.)
Iâm a professional translator. I work in video games and software, with an occasional dash of literary translation. Iâve worked in translation proper, Iâve worked on editing other peopleâs work, Iâve led a couple of translator teams. Iâve worked the occasional miracle, working around some Really Dumb Choices the developers made.
(Spoiler alert: other languages have different syntax and grammar, if you give me a list of nouns to translate, and then give me the plural âsâ to translate separately, this is not good. Even in English, woman -> womans is dumb.)
I am a fan of making things affordable and accessible. I am really happy that Google Translate and similar things can tell me the gist of what people are saying in conversations I only half care about. As the poster above says, itâs great! Not perfect, but ok!
Do you know whatâs not great? Do you know what the OP in the original image means?
The client the original image is talking about isnât you. Itâs not some person on the internet trying to find out what someone said in a Post. The client theyâre talking about is, essentially, the corporation: the translation agency, the publishing house, the IT giant.
You, the individual, do not have the power to demand how I do my job. If you come to me and say, âSarshi, I want you to take this 300-word post, run it through Google Translate, and then charge me half of what you usually do for translating itâ, I can take it or leave it.
But I get contacted by agencies - half of them want this. âWe have a game, Sarshi! Just post-edit the results of a machine translation!â âWe have support articles, Sarshi! Weâre paying you a lot less to post-edit the results of machine translation!â
You say itâs ok to have 80% accuracy, and I feel you! Yes, sometimes it is! But companies are like âlol, this worksâ, too!
Itâs happening over and over. And these arenât⊠theyâre not people, you know? Theyâre not Auntie May trying to figure out what the dough recipe she got from her niece in Indonesia says. Theyâre agencies, trying to increase their earnings by promising top quality to companies, then going, âgosh, we said weâd do it for cheap, how can we manage that?â
Or they can even be large companies themselves. Oh, youâve spent a bajillion trillion dollars trying to create the CryptoNFTVirtualRealityAI hybrid that everybody knew wouldnât work and now you panic because your earnings are lower than usual? Oh, and you want to âcut costsâ by screwing over every contractor you have? Great. Just great.
This is going to screw you over - you, the individual. Not my client, not the translatorâs client in general - the companyâs client. The corporation is too big to really care about how you feel about their product - the employees individually might, but the companyâs only metric is if you buy it or not. And the company makes decisions based on what brings the most money for the least cost.
So your hardware manuals might be crap and you might be in tears because you have no idea how to make your new appliance do the thing. Youâll go on YouTube and youâll find a solution, and youâll eventually figure it out. And maybe youâll forget about the crap manual in time. So next time, they still wonât get a good translator, because they already have a cheaper solution that seems to work.
So your game looks like it was translated by a bunch of rats in a bunker and you can barely understand what anyoneâs saying? Well, maybe they got a bottom-feeding agency overpromise that they totally have legit translators working for $1/hour. Pinky swear! Did you buy the game? You did. So⊠the system worked! Theyâll hire the same agency again!
Itâs like the clothing industry all over again. We could have better clothes, but itâs cheaper not to. Theyâre doing us a service by selling us shoes that wonât last a season, and T-shirts that will look like crap after washing them twice - theyâre cheap, arenât they? Theyâre affordable. Anyone can get clothes. (So you pay more in time are are more frustrated? Whoâs counting!)
And meanwhile, itâs easy to forget things might be different. That we have the ability to create good things, pleasant things. That manuals can be easily readable, that games can sound great, that books can be awesome to read. It becomes harder to trust the market, harder to believe in quality, easier to say that this is normal, this is how things just are.
And if you speak English natively, well⊠Youâre at a huge advantage. A lot of stuff is created by your people, for you. For countries like mine, that are small enough to import a lot, nearly everything is translated. I want you to imagine almost all movies subbed, every appliance made elsewhere (with menus needing translated and all), every app in a foreign language. And everybody who can cut costs will try to.
Itâs not⊠itâs not great.
