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One sign of a maturing industry or branches within an industry are companies that evolve to cater to that specific industry branch. When all kinds of companies and products rose up in the early 2000s to cater specifically to translators (I’m not thinking of translation environment tools here, 比如会计工具, 转换程序, 等.),我认为这是“永利登录网址”已经到来的信号. We were important enough that companies could actually be sustained by building tools for us.
The machine translation (MT) space is so interesting when it comes to this. It’s not an accident that the names of most MT developers are not known primarily for building MT engines (think Microsoft, 谷歌, Yandex, 百度, Naver, 亚马逊, 等.). These are companies that might sell access to their MT services, but commerce alone likely wouldn’t justify the cost of building and maintaining them. In combination with the primary purpose of those companies—which in all these cases is strengthening their core product (most often their search engines)—it does make sense to build an MT engine and then sell it as an additional benefit of sorts.
当然,也有例外. 而DeepL则一如既往地保密, I think it’s probably not far-f等hed to assume that it’s now profitable. And companies like Systran, KantanMT, and a handful of others are also…well, at least surviving. The point is that despite the very large relevance that MT plays in most of our professional lives, 很少有产品能够盈利.
There also have been many attempts to either automate the selection of MT, 比如现在已经不存在的公平贸易翻译, 或验证后期编辑的水平, 比如瑞士后期编辑评分. The 翻译 Automation User Society (TAUS) has proposed many approaches to MT over the years that have usually eventually been abandoned. 不过, I’m always interested when there are new products that try to approach this from a slightly different angle or, 也许更正确, stubbornly try something again that hasn’t worked in the past.
Achim Ruopp is the founder and chief executive officer of Polyglot Technology, 这家小公司提供一种他们称之为MT Decider的产品.1 Its premise is really quite simple, but it might be very helpful for some.
大多数翻译都以某种方式使用机器翻译. Sometimes it’s the client who decides what engine to use, but sometimes it’s up to us. The vast majority of translators will then make a choice between the major available engines without any customization. (I know there are exceptions, but overall I believe that’s true.) Some translators have educated opinions on which engine is currently the best available engine for the language combination in question, and if it’s a language combination like English>Spanish or English>German (or vice versa), those opinions may stay educated even over a period of time because the output quality of those large language combinations doesn’t change too much. 对于较小的语言组合,这可能会有所不同. If, 例如, 你在芬兰工作吗?, 立陶宛, 或者哈萨克斯坦, the output of the respective MT engines might vary significantly from month to month. 为什么? Because the corpora the engines are trained on are relatively small, and any addition might have a significant impact on the quality of the MT output in comparison to its competing engines.
再看另一个例子. Say you run a midsize language services provider that often needs to work with 20+ languages for which you would like to use MT (in whatever capacity). 很明显, you don’t have the insight and knowledge about which engine is the best for each language pair. So, you can subscribe to quarterly reports that run tests on large MT engines (right now: Microsoft, 谷歌, 亚马逊, and DeepL) that will provide a current readout on the quality of the output of said engines. Each engine and language combination are tested with two different evaluation systems: the, 争议颇多, BLEU (bilingual evaluation understudy) and the newer COMET (Crosslingual Optimized Metric for Evaluation of 翻译), 它本身是基于神经系统的. 这些系统在评估输出方面并非完美无瑕, but they’re able to detect changes from one report to the next, 这才是真正有趣的地方. (This is also something that’s otherwise unavailable unless you use a much more expensive system like Intento—which, 最近intto告诉我的, 真的不再关注小供应商了).
作为一个独立的翻译, you can buy a quarterly subscription for $29 for two language combinations. As a language services provider, it’ll cost you $299 for all 48 available language combinations. You can see a list of the available languages and other information on the Polyglot Technology site I linked to.
There are still a few shortcomings I imagine Achim will eventually address. (例如, it’s not currently possible to do assessments of customized engines or specific domains.) But, again, if there’s an uptake in the system, I’m sure there will be improvements.
为了展示和说明的目的,你可以 download an English>French report 来自Polyglot Technology. 如果你只想要一个报告,但不订阅, 你可以先付订阅费, 获取报告, 然后再次退订.
请注意
Jost Zetzsche is a translation industry and translation technology consultant. 他是 Characters with Character: 50 Ways to Rekindle Your Love Affair with Language. jzetzsche@internationalwriters.com
This column has two goals: to inform the community about technological advances and encourage the use and appreciation of technology among translation professionals.