On Friday, October 20, the Swiss consulting and consulting company in the field of localization Slator published another episode of the SLATORpod podcast, in which a member of the team of the translation company ASAP-translation.com, s.r.o., Jakub Absolonwas a guest of Florian Faes. The main topic was the controversial use of the so-called of full post-editing of machine translation (Full Post-editing of Machine Translation), which artificially lowers the prices of suppliers in the translation chain. This current topic dominates the podcast, but Jakub also talked about current trends in the use of NMT and LLM in the translation process, for example, the innovation we recently introduced into the translation process, which is the automated creation of monolingual terminological glossaries using LLM models. Read on.
“We are surprised by the effort to promote the so-called Full PE, where the desired result is qualitatively at the level of human translation. The theory of the existence of Full PE and Light PE came to an end in 2016 even in the ISO standard, where Full PE is defined as “2.1.5 full post-editing, the process of correcting the output of machine translation (2.1.2) to obtain a product comparable to human by translation”. The very fact that the standard uses the phrase resp. the term “comparable to human translation” seems almost grotesque, since the standard should precisely define its subject and not set freely interpretable values. Unfortunately, the lobby of IT companies is very strong and opening this topic is very unpopular. Instead, we hear more and more about the “uselessness” and the end of translators and the amazing performances of NMTs and LLMs. However, the practice is completely different. People are still asking for quality, but thanks to theories about Full PE, they would like to buy a high-quality translation at half the price, because the translator actually has everything ready, they just need to find the few mistakes made by the MT robot. It’s similar to finding a needle in a haystack, but you pay the finder based on the number of needles found. MT has significantly changed the translators’ work system and opens the door to the use of so-called SMEs, i.e. subject matter experts, to perform PE, where thanks to their perfect mastery of the terminology and processes mentioned in the text for translation, they can actually achieve a higher quality output than a professional translator who is not an expert in the given field. It is therefore absolutely necessary to adapt the curriculum at universities in the field of translation studies and to focus more on terminology management and proofreading, which will play an increasingly important role in the translation process.”
SLATORpod is watched by thousands of viewers and listeners, therefore we believe that Jakub’s contribution will interest and contribute to the popularization of our opinions, but also our work in the field of translation and localization services.
Jakub Absolon as a guest of Slatorpod (left Jakub Absolon, CEO of ASAP-translation.com, LSP company, right Florian Faes, managing director of SLATOR)
