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Writer's pictureRobert Clayton

Prospects of Translation Services


Technologies and Translation Services

Present day technologies make us more dependent on something technical or digital. Figures on the PC or Cell Phone screen replaced tangible paper money, digital Bitcoins replaced metal coins, typed text on laptop replaced the human hand written text. Paper documents are substituted by PDF documents sent between computers either via fiber optic lines or by satellite radio communication.


Prospects of Translation Services

Artificial Intelligence - good or bad?

We are gradually shifting towards virtual reality where all objects which we still see and can touch shall also be controlled by digital signals sent from smart home devices or smart phone applications. The world is changing rapidly and the result of such change is contradictory. Some say that robots or artificial intelligence is good and hepling, whereas others say that it shall be harmful and disastrous.

How can emerging digital age affect Translations?

Now as we are providing the document translation we are more concerned not just about the future of the world but about how and to what extent shall the translation services be impacted by digital age rise. With the emerging of high-tech solutions for communication like instant translators produced by Microsoft or Google, the need in the physical assistance of human translator is becoming less desparate and immediate. Definitely, there are a lot of speculations on how much will the world be changed but by observing the ongoing and steady development of all kinds of new technologies and inventions of smart appliances we can guess that such tendency will bring the more or less predictable result where nearly all human work shall be replaced by robotised machines or just robots.

Such a prospect is not promising any good for a great number of humans, not just translators. Of course, nobody wants to be substituted by a piece of iron or copper or even plastic.

So what is really threatening to a human or to a translator in particular?

Now we as translators are heavily using such tools as CAT tools. These are actually the Computer Aided Tools that facilitate the process of translation and make it an easy job. On the one hand there is nothing wrong with that. And it really helps a lot. But the other side of the coin is that such "tools" or actually the translation software is getting hooked to a global network or database which accumulates and stores all the translation results on "their" big servers and then launch products like Google Translate or Skype Voice or Facebook Online Translation features.

So when you use such adorable tools you got compromised by "big companies" or those who impose the rules for ethics and morals and frighten people with "personal data breaches".

So what to do in this case?

Well, we can either choose the passive following the path "they" point to us or active struggle against any kind of "leaks" by just not using the software which gets connected to big server or any "outside" cloud space or environment.

What is Your choice?

If you choose to stay incognito you have stay away from all and any devices and software that has a connection to the source of updates and automatic sharing. And then if you would need to translate a document you will have to refuse from using programs like Trados or WordFast or just disconnect it from global support and/or database with ready made translation results.

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