7 C’s of text types where humans translate best #1: ‘C’ is for Complex

In this next episode of his mini-podcast series on key factors to consider beforehand when procuring translation for your business, our MD, Andrew looks at the 7 ‘C’s of premium content types, where an exclusively AI translation approach can lead to problems down the line.

 

Find the transcript below for 7 C’s of text types where humans translate best #1: ‘C’ is for Complex

My latest podcast series looks at business translations and at specifc text types where the involvement of an experienced professional human translator or translators is advisable.
We’ve devised a nice letter ‘C’ mnemonic to help you remember these business critical text types, that need to carry a serious AI translation health warning!
So dive into the 7 C’s that are unsuitable for AI translation, particularly if the AI translation is not being post-edited and verified by a professional translator:

C is for ‘complex’
AI translators like the neural machine translators Google, DeepL or the LLMs like ChatGPT and CoPilot are now getting pretty good. For English source texts that are plainly written and straightforward you’ll often get excellent results. And the beauty of these tools is they’re free!!
But don’t expect such good results when the text is complex. I mean complex semantically which often means complex syntactically. In laymans terms this means hard to understand both in terms of the subject matter, and in terms of the way it’s written. ‘Give me some examples’ you say. OK, we’re talking about Technical Reports, technical instruction manuals, legal arguments, Scientific or academic journals, etc. The AI translators will more often than not struggle with these sort of texts. Sometimes the situation can be remedied by a relatively low-cost review (or post-edit to use the translation industry term) by a professional human translator, but at other times the time required to correct the AI outputs can be as long as a qualified translator would need to translate them from scratch!
Another important point to bear in mind with complex technical texts like operating manuals is specialist terminology. Run some tests to see whether your chosen AI can correctly translate your technical terms. But beware, even if it gets these mostly right on a short text, what about when it translates your full technical manual with 50, 100 or more pages? AI translators are not known for their consistency.. and your readers in the different languages will not thank you if your company’s terms are translated differently in different pages, sections, or manual variants.
So to sum up, beware of assigning translation of your complex texts to AI. For your own peace of mind get a professional translator to at least read it through and verify it, and be prepared, in some cases, for a not very flattering overall assessment!

In my next podcast I’ll tell you about text type #2 of the 7 ‘C’s: ‘C’ is for Compliant.

Thanks for listening!

A podcast by  Andrew Schlich.