Forecast at more than $1 billion or revenue by the end of 2023; machine translation services have shown consistent growth as more and more businesses target global markets, resulting in higher demand for translation services. The effort to keep pace with this increasing demand for location-based content drives translation and language service providers to adopt faster and more cost-effective processes.
One method used to fill the gap of translation services available in the market is Post-Edited Machine Translation. PEMT is the process of reviewing, editing, and updating machine-completed translation manually by professional translators to ensure the most accurate translation has been produced.
Despite the enormous advancements in artificial intelligence in machine translation, it is still necessary to use human translators to compare the output of machine translation service to the source input for accuracy, clarity, and consistency before any improvements or retranslations are completed. Machines continue to aid translators in accuracy and predicted outcomes offering much quicker results and boost efficiency, thus, PMET is a cost-efficient option for projects that have high volume and fixed milestones to ensure a high quality of output.
The evolving role of linguists and translators
As developers continue to fine-tune the machine translation algorithms, the skills, and creativity of language professionals who understand the nuances of international languages will still be relied upon for business to grow internationally. As new technologies, tools, and processes, such as PEMT are available to the markets, the role of linguists and translators will evolve to become approvers/editors who oversee and review post-edited translations that new technologies have created.
More opportunities, not less
Given the points discussed above, it could indicate that translation applications and machine translation processes threaten the jobs of professional linguists and translators, but in fact, these tools are a gateway to more opportunities as they offer companies a path for international growth and localization.
As the digital transformation of the translation industry continues, professional linguists and translators prepare for the inevitable changes by increasing their skillsets and learn to use the new technologies to their advantage.