Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Human Translation Versus Machine Translation

There are several legal and technical problems a litigation team will experience when handling litigation over borders. One of the greater issues associates understanding and correctly classifying documents which are not written in the language conversed by the legal team. In this circumstance, it may be suitable to have the documents translated from their original language into the language spoken by the legal team. For instance, if a document set consists of documents in German, French and Japanese, and if the reviewers are native English speakers, then documents should be translated into English before review.

The documents can be translated using technology or a translator can be hired who is fluent in both languages to translate the documents. Deciding machine and human translation is a common difficulty as there are pros and cons to both approaches.

The three primary benefits of machine translation are time, money and consistency. While a human translator needs breaks and usually works nearly eight hours per day, a computer can work for more time, and consumes less time to translate a set of documents compared to a person. Moreover, the cost of translation software is very less compared to the costs of hiring a person. In computer translation, the computer reacts to the same set of factors in the same way every time, producing constant language translations, but it does not necessarily mean correct. The main disadvantage of machine translation is accuracy.

The maihttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifn disadvantage of machine translation is the main advantage of human translation like accuracy. Machines cannot understand the context and are not programmed to identify slang words and phrases. Machines lack the ability to translate cultural elements and they translate literally, instead of including colloquial terminology. Also machines are unable to solve the wide range of complex rules and uncertainties which are present among the different languages all over the world. So, human translation can more correctly reflect the meaning of the language, particularly in situations in which the document set consists of informal communications.


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