How Taia is successfully riding the wave of translation demand

So from this regard, you know, changing the way translators work and they shouldn’t be afraid…What practices do you recommend to the translators in this new era?

Well, it’s…a translator – I read this somewhere once, I think one of our translators shared it in our chat – a translator is a reader, an interpreter, and a creator at the same time, when they read content and they consume it and they make it in a new language. And in some cases, it’s a very creative job. You have to come up with very clever ideas and keep your mind involved, and in the past it was even more so. You had to come up with everything. Now you get the assistance of the AI, or you get the assistance of the translation memory. And a lot of times, it has been debated that all of these inputs from different technological ideas will stream your mind into a different point of view that you might not even think of and the way that your brain would conceive it might’ve come even with a better approach, or a lot of times it’s a much better approach. So because you are shown, let’s say one or the two or three different possibilities in whatever tool you’re using that you’re helping yourself to translate with, you don’t see the idea that your mind would have conceived on its own. And this is something that is sometimes an issue when it comes to translating, especially very creative content. So as much as technology can be very helpful in some specific cases, specifically let’s say literature or marketing content or anything that needs a creative human input might suffer from all of these technological inputs. So I think this is where the beauty of the translation profession, of people who dedicate their time and energy to study this for a few years and then develop their skills and then go out into the market and provide this, is still there. It’s always going to be there. But again, a lot of students will need to learn new technology before they even finish college because their entire occupation might change from the time they enroll into the university to the time they finish four or five, or however many years later. They probably will need to learn entire new concepts that weren’t even there. If you take a look at the time right now, we just discussed, you know, five years ago, neural machine translation wasn’t even an option because it didn’t exist yet.

Well yeah, I mean, I understand where you’re coming from. Will that make a translator more like a reviewer or a revisor, or maybe a terminology manager? Are there kind of role-related changes as well in this career path?

Yeah, I think, yes. I mean, with the technology making translations easier for humans, it’s easier to translate something than it was ever before with all the assistance that you get now. Not only will the roles of translators already out there change from being more creators, to being more revisers and making sure that the machine didn’t make a mistake. But also, more people will be able to translate than ever before. So on the one hand, this allows for a much bigger diversity of translation services. So for example, we can now offer something that’s, you know, post-machine translation editing plus additional editing and plus proofreading – sorry, translating and editing and proofreading with like a traditional TEP service, everything that’s, you know, part of the process that we used to talk about. And of course this is a beautiful service for when you need it, but sometimes you don’t need that kind of service. You don’t need three humans to make sure that some documentation is perfectly translated if you already know that this documentation is just there for its own purposes. For example, we had a client a few months ago who had an inspection coming into their company, and this inspection decided that, oh yeah, you are a foreign company, but some of your contents like documentation for some specific certificates that probably no one will ever read has to be localized. And they couldn’t afford a TEP service for that because it wasn’t something in their budgets. It would cost them, I think, about a 100k euro or something like that for the amount that they had, it was a bunch of content. And they knew that no one is ever going to read it except the inspector who comes in and says, “okay, you have this translated, it’s done, let’s move on”. So what they decided to go with is something that we call machine translation with light review, which means that if, suppose that the machine translation is of sufficient quality – I’m not saying, you know, we would do this for any type of machine translation, it has to be some proper quality first – a translator would just come in and remove the biggest mistakes in the text, just, you know, go through, make sure it works, even though it doesn’t sound perfect or it doesn’t run smoothly, it’s not how a native speaker would probably say it if they were to write it down from scratch. But it’s there, it’s translated. It allows someone to understand what it means, but it’s not perfect by no standards, you know? But this just allows, you know, with all of these different creative uses of this technology to provide different levels of services, wherever they might be applicable. There are cases, of course, when this isn’t possible. For example, imagine you have a legal document that you need translated – let’s say you have, I don’t know, a merger with another company, right? You wouldn’t want to trust that to machine translation, right? Not now, not in 50 years, I assume. You would want to have someone to go through that, not once, but twice or three times and make sure that this content is perfectly translated and that there’s no mistakes left in there. And this is the difference in what’s actually the demand, the market. And to go back to the topic that I just briefly mentioned before, yes, this technology allows so many more people to be able to translate. So when it comes to simple content, content that just needs to get, you know, from one language to another, and someone just needs to be able to understand it, now it’s easier than ever before for someone to go in there and make a machine translation and just check if they’re bilingual, is this machine translation correct? Yes, it is. Does it sound perfect? No. Does it have to? No. So it’s good enough for whatever the client needs it for. And who are we as translators or translation companies or service providers to decide what the client actually needs? You know, it’s still their choice. Let’s keep it an open market as it’s supposed to be, right?