Under pressure: translation in times of austerity

Moorkens, Joss

doi:10.1080/0907676x.2017.1285331

Cited by 74 publications

(43 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…NMT has generated great hype, especially as the translation industry is eager for improved MT quality in order to minimise costs (Moorkens, 2017). Although promising results are being reported when comparing NMT with other MT paradigms using automatic metrics, when human evaluation is added to the comparison, the results are not yet so clear-cut.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is Neural Machine Translation the New State of the Art?

Castilho¹,

Moorkens²,

Gaspari³

et al. 2017

The Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics

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152

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This paper discusses neural machine translation (NMT), a new paradigm in the MT field, comparing the quality of NMT systems with statistical MT by describing three studies using automatic and human evaluation methods. Automatic evaluation results presented for NMT are very promising, however human evaluations show mixed results. We report increases in fluency but inconsistent results for adequacy and post-editing effort. NMT undoubtedly represents a step forward for the MT field, but one that the community should be careful not to oversell.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is Neural Machine Translation the New State of the Art?

Castilho¹,

Moorkens²,

Gaspari³

et al. 2017

The Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics

Self Cite

152

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“…Some research deals with specific technologies and their effects on translators, such as translation memory (Garcia, 2007;LeBlanc, 2017;Moorkens, Lewis, Reijers, Vanmassenhove, & Way, 2016), machine translation (Kenny & Doherty, 2014), and translation crowdsourcing (Flanagan, 2016;Garcia, 2015;O'Hagan, 2017). Other works deal with social and economic effects in translation (Moorkens, 2017), provide a conceptual and methodological framework (Olohan, 2011) or offer theoretical frameworks for the overall situation (Cronin, 2013). Kenny calls this line of research "STS (science and technology studies) inspired approaches to translation technology" 1 , but says such work is still "few and far between" (2017, p. 6).…”

Section: )mentioning

confidence: 99%

Unintended consequences of translation technologies: from project managers’ perspectives

Sakamoto

2018

Perspectives

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Acknowledgments I would like to extend my gratitude to the study participants for taking time out of their busy schedules to share their insights. This study was conducted as part of the larger project, When Translation Meets Technologies: Language Service Providers (LSPs) in the Digital Age, funded by the University of Portsmouth. Bio note Akiko Sakamoto is senior lecturer in translation studies and Japanese language at the University of Portsmouth, UK. She holds a PhD in translation studies from the University of Leicester, UK. Her research interests include sociology of translation, particularly the influence of technology on translation practitioners and users, pedagogy of translation and translation theories. She previously worked as an English -Japanese translator. 2 Unintended consequences of translation technologies: From project managers' perspectives Recent years have seen the advance of increasingly efficient translation and translation-related technologies such as neural machine translation and crowdsourcing-style translator procurement platforms. These AI, big-data and algorithm-driven online systems are hailed as successes in the media-and technology-vendor-led public discourse. However, in light of the notion of 'solutionism' (Morozov, 2013), there may be a risk that unintended adverse consequences of these technologies on users remain obscured. As a result, a correct assessment of the influence of technologies on human actors may become difficult. In order to identify such unintended consequences of translation technologies, the present article explores technology users' perceptions about how the technology is affecting their business practice. The discussion draws on data collected in a focus group study with 16 translation project managers. The study reveals that project managers are feeling a high level of uncertainty and unease about the effects of technology when they talk about business practices, particularly in the following areas: translators' use of MT, pricing for postediting, post-editors' profiles and skills and technology-induced new power struggles in the industry.

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“…But given concerns among post-editors about remuneration and boredom in particular (see Moorkens and O'Brien 2017), such a move risks being seen as a downward migration, and unappealing to many 'rational' incumbents. Meanwhile a strategy of upward migration, or holding steady if one is already serving top-end clients, is promoted by translators' organisations such as the Institute of Translation and Interpreting (ITI) in the United Kingdom and authors such as Moorkens (2017). This position has come under fire from some quarters however, including from Pym (2016), who appears to denigrate the ambitions of those who seek to serve high-end customers, and some translators have found themselves obliged to attest to the very existence of 'high-end' or 'premium' markets (see, for example, Sardon, 2017).…”

Section: The Translator's Dilemmamentioning

confidence: 99%