Agency in Translation
By
Obododimma Oha
The idea of agency in translation simply tries to answer the question : "Who or what handles translation for us?" There are two agents known in translation and these following below are discussed in this lecture :
(1) The human translator
(2) The machine as a translator.
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The human translator:
The human translator refers to the human person that is filled with human knowledge, assumptions, and values handling the translation. Crucial in respect of human translation are :
(1) Knowledge of the SL and of the TL
(2) Training or experience in translation
(3) Fidelity.
Knowledge of the SL and of the TL
The translator is expected to be a balanced bilingual, having a good command of the systems of the SL and of the TL. If the translator is deficient in any of both languages, a bad translation will result. So, a deep or good knowledge of both languages is necessary.
Training:
The translator also needs to have a good training or experience in translation so as to minimize personal problems. Don't they say that experience is the best teacher? That is correct. Even if the translator has not studied translation at school, having experimented with the translation of texts would help. So, experience is also a kind of training on translation.
Studying theoretical issues on translation at school may reveal what to avoid and what to expect. Training, therefore, can be considered a good asset in this business.
In the training, assignments on problems may be given and scenarios set for problems that trainees are to solve. That is why it is not good to joke with exercises or have someone else carry them out for us. The trainee is losing skills greatly in this case.
Some Advantages in Using a Human Translator :
(1) The human translator can alter style or approach in the translation, for instance, knowing when being literal is better.
(2) The human translator can deal with the stylistics, semantics and pragmatics of expressions.
(3) The human translator is seriously needed to ameliorate syntactic and semantic problems in automatic or machine translation.
The Machine Translator :
Machine translation or MT is viewed mostly as part of computational linguistics.
The involvement of machines in translation and other human activities is mainly to help, to make the work move faster, and to achieve more and the idea of saving cost. But the involvement of machines (artificial intelligence) has created problems, which include denying human beings jobs and creating more exclusion.
Three Types of Machine Translation :
Note these three types of machine translation identified for us :
(1) Rule-based machine translation:
"uses grammar and language rules, developed by language experts, and dictionaries which can be customized to a specific topic or industry."
(2) Statistical machine translation:
"does not rely on linguistic rules and words; it learns how to translate by analyzing large amount of existing human translations."
(3) Neural machine translation:
"teaches itself on how to translate by using a large neural network. This method is becoming more and more popular as it provides better results with language pairs."
https://www.memoq.com/tools/what-is-machine-translation
The forms of machine that have featured in translation include
-- translation machines
-- computers
-- computer apps (eg Babel fish. More translation software like Google Translate and Language Translator can be found in the application stores of many Android phones).
Further research :
https://lingo-star.com/automatic-translation-what-it-means-and-what-it-represents/?v=4326ce96e26
https://www.memoq.com/tools/what-is-machine-translation
https://blog.weglot.com/automatic-translation-vs-machine-translation-explained/
https://www.smartling.com/resources/101/what-is-automatic-translation/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_translation
https://www.memsource.com/machine-translation/
Problems Encountered in Machine Translation :
(1) Unrecognized linguistic segments that the machine cannot deal with.
(2) STs not having ecopies and needing to be retype.
(3) Translation being done with little or no consideration of context as a factor.
(4) Human translation being less and less given serious consideration or translation seen less as a human activity.
Automatic Translation
These days, distinction is made between machine translation and automated translation. It could be confusing and one would be wondering how machine translation aided by the computer is not automatic. It has been explained that
"Automated translation may be used to automate the machine translation of text as a stage in the localization workflow. However, automated translation and machine translation are not interchangeable terms as they serve entirely different functions. "
At
https://www.memsource.com/machine-translation/
The idea of automation is therefore a function added to a machine and computer-aided translation to make it more self-reliant as artificial intelligence. In other words, to control itself. It then means that one can still view automatic translation as part of machine translation, though a development.
There are even some languages that defy auto-translation as pointed out in this BBC report :
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210322-the-languages-that-defy-auto-translate
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This just a short survey of agency of translation. It is not an attempt to go into detail. As we can see, some agents have already grown into subdisciplines.
The view is that human beings and machines have been agents for some reasons.
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