Machine language translation cannot now – and may never – replace a human’s writing skills and mastery of linguistic nuance.
As Ry Beville points out in his article entitled No substitute for human touch in translating, machine translation’s shortcomings become especially apparent when dealing with languages that differ greatly in linguistic structure. A professional translator, Beville works in Japanese and English -- a language pair that translates especially poorly in automatic systems. While Beville gives full credit to practical online dictionaries and other computer-based language aids, he remains convinced that human-generated translations are here to stay:
“Such [translation] programs, while convenient in a casual setting, still have a long way to go before they become truly viable...It’s all the meaning that is lost, especially between Japanese and English,” writes Beville. “Linguistic science tells us these languages are worlds apart. For a native-English speaker, Japanese is a level-five language, meaning the hardest to master (a distinction it shares with Arabic).”
Thus, the risk of machine translation errors definitely rises when translating to and from languages with little resemblance to English.
Language Translation, Inc. in San Diego, California is specialized in legal, medical, and business language translation, and we translate to and from over 40 languages, including Japanese. Our company has provided translation
and interpreting to companies worldwide for over 20 years.
Betty Carlson | 
