I went through the notes on this post specifically to find this reply - or one like it. Because it has a point, and itās a decent point for you, the person. But itās also missing the info of the larger scale problem.
(Or it isnāt; as you rightly point out in the tags, itās a capitalism problem. But Iāll expand on this point of ācapitalismā. I need to rant. I need to scream.)
Iām a professional translator. I work in video games and software, with an occasional dash of literary translation. Iāve worked in translation proper, Iāve worked on editing other peopleās work, Iāve led a couple of translator teams. Iāve 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 āsā 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, itās great! Not perfect, but ok!
Do you know whatās not great? Do you know what the OP in the original image means?
The client the original image is talking about isnāt you. Itās not some person on the internet trying to find out what someone said in a Post. The client theyāre 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, āSarshi, 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 itā, I can take it or leave it.
But I get contacted by agencies - half of them want this. āWe have a game, Sarshi! Just post-edit the results of a machine translation!ā āWe have support articles, Sarshi! Weāre paying you a lot less to post-edit the results of machine translation!ā
You say itās ok to have 80% accuracy, and I feel you! Yes, sometimes it is! But companies are like ālol, this worksā, too!
Itās happening over and over. And these arenātā¦ theyāre not people, you know? Theyāre not Auntie May trying to figure out what the dough recipe she got from her niece in Indonesia says. Theyāre agencies, trying to increase their earnings by promising top quality to companies, then going, āgosh, we said weād do it for cheap, how can we manage that?ā
Or they can even be large companies themselves. Oh, youāve spent a bajillion trillion dollars trying to create the CryptoNFTVirtualRealityAI hybrid that everybody knew wouldnāt work and now you panic because your earnings are lower than usual? Oh, and you want to ācut costsā 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 translatorās client in general - the companyās client. The corporation is too big to really care about how you feel about their product - the employees individually might, but the companyās 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. Youāll go on YouTube and youāll find a solution, and youāll eventually figure it out. And maybe youāll forget about the crap manual in time. So next time, they still wonāt 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 anyoneās 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. Soā¦ the system worked! Theyāll hire the same agency again!
Itās like the clothing industry all over again. We could have better clothes, but itās cheaper not to. Theyāre doing us a service by selling us shoes that wonāt last a season, and T-shirts that will look like crap after washing them twice - theyāre cheap, arenāt they? Theyāre affordable. Anyone can get clothes. (So you pay more in time are are more frustrated? Whoās counting!)
And meanwhile, itās 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, wellā¦ Youāre 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.
Itās notā¦ itās not great.
tangentwithtanner
turnnoffyourmind
prguitarman
amandla
blakekathryn
pixelskylines
