Benefits of using qualified machine translation
Qualified machine translation and quality estimates can ease our lives in many ways. Currently we have API available for every translation applications and widgets. Here are some ideas about how MT-Qualifier could be used in different situations:
Benefit A: Get best machine translation
Like you probably know, there are very many machine translators available. Some of them are very popular and others less known, but what they all have in common is that none of them is suitable for every case. The translation quality can vary a lot not only between different machine translation engines but also between situations and even sentences.
Thus people often ask which machine translator they should use. Choose MT-Qualifier and you’ll always get the best translation for each case. MT-Qualifier finds the best translation with the help of several widely used machine translation engines. The selection process is automated using new and advanced technology.
The best thing is that the selection is made separately for every sentence. This ensures the highest machine translation quality for the entire text. It is not enough that some parts of the text are translated well if the others make no sense!
While it is true that machine translation is never completely flawless, MT-Qualifier fits perfectly on those translation cases when raw machine translation is not enough and professional translation is too much. MT-Qualifier works best in everyday communication media, like blogs, emails, message boards, news forums, websites etc. Generally speaking, in every application or widget where raw machine translation can be used, qualified machine translation can do the job with higher quality.
Benefit B: Cut translation costs
Most translation and language service providers (LSPs) and freelance translators have a huge pressure to deliver high-quality translations more and more efficiently, faster and, most of all, at a lower price. When the competition is harsh and the (low) price is the most important thing to customers, costs have to come down.
Translating is and will be a people centric industry. Only highly professional translators and interpreters can produce the best translation quality. Thus manpower is the biggest cost factor in the industry. MT-Qualifier helps to cut down the costs by automating some of the manual translation work.
Quality is often the most precious matter of honor for professional translators. However, some customers do not need and are not willing to pay for the best quality. Or some translation projects require less formal translation. Or sometimes the quality will be the same whether translated from scratch or by proofreading automatic translation; the only difference being that proofreading is faster.
MT-Qualifier is an excellent tool for producing automatic translations for proofreading purposes. With the quality scores it is fast and easy to see which pieces need more attention from the professional translator. Wisely allocated resources are the best way to work more cost-efficiently.
Many translators say that they don’t use machine translation because it takes more time to edit the bad translation than it takes to translate from scratch. So, it might be wise to automatically filter out the most awful machine translated sentences and let the professional translator translate those parts from scratch.
MT-Qualifier is easy to integrate into most translation tools to enable even higher translators’ productivity. Why not to choose the easy way? A computer doesn’t have to follow the limits of a human.
Benefit C: Improve quote making and planning
The translation industry includes a lot of quote making and resource allocating. Accurate and proper quotes are important for a profitable language service provider. Any business will suffer if the margins sink due to unrealistically low quotes. Unexpected delays and too close due dates are very expensive.
The fact that translation work is not tied to a place or time make it a truly global industry. It means very harsh competition where the reliable and early bird catches the worm. MT-Qualifier is the motor of any tool or application designed for fast decision making in translation industry. By scanning the material quickly with MT-Qualifier you’ll get a thorough analysis about how easy or difficult the text is to translate. The more difficult the text is to translate the longer it will take to do the job, and this needs to reflect to the price.
Likewise, MT-Qualifier works well also as a justification for the given prices. For example, post-editing effort is difficult to price in a way that all parties agree. This can cause problems between LSPs and translators and customers. A justified measure for post-editing effort would solve the problem and make the pricing more visible. In every industry transparency will increase satisfaction between all parties.
Benefit D: Bargain the best price for your translation job
A common dilemma between a translator and his customer is the difficulty level of a text. The customers do not want to become tricked by translation service providers. The fear of paying too much is so severe it can lead to unpleasant and repeated conversations.
These conversation may go something like this:
Customer: “How much do you charge for translating this letter?”
Translator: “You know my fixed price per word.”
Customer: “But this letter is written with such a super simple language that your regular price is too high.”
Translator: “That doesn’t matter because it would still require the same amount of work. I’m not able to give any discount.”
Customer: “Maybe I study my other options first. I’ll get back to you later.”
No one wins in situations like this when there is one opinion against another. MT-Qualifier can be used in simple scanning applications to find out whether the material is easy and quick to translate. It is much nicer to bargain when there is a real argument advocating the lower price.
Benefit E: Write text that machine can translate best
Machine translation is by far the cheapest way to get something translated. Nonetheless, the challenge with automatic translations is to learn how to write text in a way taht it is most translatable. In other words this means that it is possible to write text that machine translators can translate with high quality.
MT-Qualifier can be used in applications which can help the author to write more machine translation friendly text. The author of the text-to-be-translated can be informed during the writing process. If the text is difficult to translate, he can edit the text right away. It is even possible to give feedback to author about how to edit the text (e.g. suggest different vocabulary).
In many cases it is possible to achieve 100% translatability. When the text can easily be translated by a machine, the savings comes from translation costs without compromising too much on the translation quality.
The global Internet environment makes it important to produce text that is easy to translate automatically. Even if the writer himself does not want to translate his material, one of his readers may use a machine translator with his browser. The better the text translates into other languages, the better the reading experience will be.
Benefit F: Improve your own machine translator
Machine translation is a big business. The potential savings on translation costs as well as the increasing amount of machine translation users have encouraged people to develop their own translation memories and machine translators. Unfortunately, all the insufficient and nonexistent quality evaluation methods have been limiting the machine translation development. Current evaluation methods require so much human work that they are mostly too inefficient to enable real improvement.
Reliable and efficient machine translation quality estimator can be very valuable in developing better machine translation engines. MT-Qualifier estimates the quality automatically which releases resources to other tasks. In addition, automation makes the development processes more effective and decreases the development costs.
Benefit G: Check the credibility of automatic translation
Mostly machine translations are used to translate foreign texts into reader’s native language. Often the reader does not understand the original text at all. So the problem is that he cannot be sure if the automatic translation is correct or not.