Human Translation vs. Machine Translation
Most technical translations done by translation agencies are done manually, with only little or minimal help from computers. However, there is a disjunction between this approach in translation and the approach of machine translation. For large institutions, such as governments, the machine translation approach is more readily available and can accomplish many translations in a shorter amount of time. This is true, especially if we are dealing with texts such as technical manuals or rule books.
On a very simple level, machine translation offers translation from a source language to a target language by simply substituting words stored from a database. On this level, the machine translation approach is efficient, because it handles that text itself the way a computer would handle numbers. However, this approach slides down once you introduce elements that are not really complex to humans, but tend to escape the logic of machines themselves. The elements that often escape machine translation are names, figurative expressions, metaphors, and other type of human speech that cannot be pinned down simply by databases, because of their dynamic quality. And thus, if a machine translation would be used to translate, say, the minutes of a meeting, or a telephone conversation, then the output would definitely not be a hundred percent.
Human translation on the other hand, would not face these difficulties. But let it be said that a good translation agency must be able to provide a prospective client a translator who has sufficient knowledge of the field, the specific cultures of the target language, and of course, a very efficient handle of the target language itself. Now, when all of these are provided, then there would be little trouble for documents to be translated and reproduced at a hundred percent in a target language, since the word disambiguation would be done a professional, who would not rely solely on only one database of glosses.
A professional translator would have the capacity to analyze the context of a particular text and would be able to translate accordingly. Also, other references that cannot be easily used by machine translations, would be available to the human translator. A translation agency would also be able to provide a translator with specific knowledge of specific fields, and thus, minimizing once again errors or ambiguities in the final translations in the target language. These are the pros and cons of human and machine translation.
