 Hi. Today I want to talk to you about machine translation. Well, I actually wanted to talk to you about being insured as a freelancer, how to go about health insurance. I'm going to wait a bit on that just because I've just moved to the US, so I'm researching that. So actually, I think I can have a lot more information to say about it if I wait a few days and gather all the information I can. Machine translation is basically Google translate, Bing translate, these automatic translators, they have apps for them, they have this, that, and the other. Sure, all you freelance translators, people who want to be freelance translators, all of you have to deal with people saying, isn't that job not going to exist anymore because machine translation is taking over. So today I'm going to give my two cents about it, tell you what I think. I'm going to use Google translate here because that's the most common form of machine translation out there. I'm going to do translations between English and Italian, because those are the languages I'm most familiar with. So yeah, let's get started. First of all, we'll start with a simple sentence, I want to buy the book. And the translation is, voglio comprar il libro, which nothing wrong with the translation, it's perfect. Well, what if I change it to, I want to buy the book, you recommend recommended. Voglio comprar il libro che si consiglia, which as any Italian speaker can tell you is wrong. It should be, yeah, che tu mi consigliato, che lei mi ha consigliato. So this shows you one of the shortcomings that you already have with Google translate. Now, some of the other examples that you'll hear about and that I've seen, pick in the pen and a pen in the pig, because say there's a pig who ate a pen, then there'll be a pen in the pig. So there is a pen in the pig. That's very odd wording, but fine, you know, it kind of works. We're on a pen in a maiale. But if you say there is a pig in the pen, c'è maiale nella penna. Here they got the first part a bit better, but here it says there is a pig literally into the pen, but any English speaker knows that by pen, you mean pig pen, there is a pig in the pig pen. Google translate has to take things word by word. The next example would be innuendos, metaphors, similes, stuff like that. These are a disaster in translation, like anyone who speaks English knows the expression to have an ax to grind. This is a translation, ax per machinare, you know, and say I want to, I have an ax to grind. And this is actually better, but it still makes no sense. And you find this a lot with expressions waiting for the other shoe to drop. This is an expression. You're waiting for something else to happen, something expected, usually something not good. Google translate doesn't know this. In fact, drop is translated as a raindrop. So this little translation says I'm waiting for the other shoe, a raindrop. And this is between Italian and English. So you can only imagine with languages that have even fewer similarities. And now we get to the fun point. And now is the fun part where I can show you a couple cool little games, I guess you can play for lack of a better word to show you how Google translate doesn't work too well. Let's do from Italian into French. These are two very similar languages. This shouldn't be too much of a problem to translate from one language to the other. We'll take a word in Italian. It's a wristwatch. It's a watch that you wear. The translation in French is part of my French pronunciation. The French here for those of you who don't speak French means to see. So got translated into English, which is watch, and watch got translated into French. But in the process, it became the other meaning of watch or a lot of means a wristwatch that you wear. And it got translated into watch as into watch TV or to see something. This is just an example of what can happen. I mean, obviously it happens with other languages as well. For those of you who speak Chinese, you'll see that again, it gets translated as can, which can means again, to see, to watch. Another instance in which this happens a lot is with formal and informal. Many languages have a formal and informal tense, but English obviously doesn't. So if I say something in Italian like say to the maestra, it means you're the teacher, you're the professor, but it's written in informal tense. This gets translated as formal in French as Google translate gets it wrong, probably gets it from the English and so assumes that it should be formal. And you know, you take German here again, it's formal in German, even though it's informal in Italian. So these differences that might not exist in English won't get translated basically in different languages. And this can obviously be a problem for many different reasons. And there are other times when Google translate is just completely playing wrong. They're Boston, which means indoor places, indoor seating, something along those lines, it gets translated as handsets. So this is another example where Google translate is just playing wrong. Actually, the place where it's worst humor with jokes with comedy. A man walks into a bar. How do I do this? Ouch. This got literally translated, but it would make no sense in Italian, right? It's a play on words, bar, the place where you go to drink is the same word as a bar that you can walk into and hurt yourself. The humor tends to be very different in different languages, you know, some languages are more sarcastic, others are more dry, others are more imagistic, others are more literal. Humor just changes so much from place to place. And I've been told actually quite a few times, if someone can make jokes and can laugh at jokes, understand jokes in a different language, then that really shows that they understand the language. And I've seen this time and time again, my father, my father is American, and he speaks fluent Italian, you know, with a bit of an accent. Very often his jokes, which are fine in English, have fallen deaf ears in Italian, even if the translation will work, it'll work fine in the Italian language. But just because he's so sarcastic, I mean, you know, many times they're thinking, wait, are you being serious or what are you saying? So that's all good and well. But what happens if Google Translate, Bing Translate, any one of these companies figures out a way, a formula to make it so the machine translation can work well with humor, with innuendo, with metaphors, with similes? Actually, at that point, I wouldn't worry, even if starting today, they have perfect technology out there. There are two main reasons why I think we'll still have a job for a while. The first reason is a lot of people won't trust it. You know, we've seen this time and time again, it takes people a long time to adapt, especially if they decide, okay, one day to the next, let's get rid of our translators and just use machine translation. That's very risky. It is a big risk. And it will take a long time, even if the technology is perfect, provably perfect, it'll still take a long time. You still have companies out there using fax machines all the time. Okay. So that's the first issue that we'll have, even if we have perfect technology. The second issue is one of liability. Basically, liability means that if something gets messed up, the client has someone to blame. They can point a finger at someone. If you have machine technology that's supposed to always be perfect, you can't really point to the technology, because that kind of means that you don't know how to use the technology, right? It's not the technology's fault, it's yours, and you need to get someone who's better with IT. I mentioned this because it's happened to me more than once, where I will perform a translation, then the client has their end client, the person they're dealing with, or one time it was just a boss, but another time it was their end client, and there's a mistake. Now, the mistake is not a mistake that I made as a translator, but it was a mistake in either the text they gave me or in what they told me to translate. They can't say, oh, we really screwed up. Sorry, we screwed up so badly. It won't happen again. They prefer to say, oh, it wasn't our fault. The translator messed up, but don't worry, we've hired a new translator, we've hired a new company, we've hired a higher-level company, something along those lines. In both cases, they kept using me all the time. They contacted me first in a panic saying, why is this way and not that way, blah, blah, blah. So I wrote them back, said actually I did exactly as I was supposed to do. Actually, they had made a mistake. They pointed the finger at me, but on the other hand, they never gave my name to the client or anything, so I don't really care, because they're still doing business with me now and they just needed to point a finger to someone in terms of liability. And I think this is something that's always in the back of their mind. If they're just dealing with technology, they don't have that extra insurance. So if you're thinking of becoming a freelance translator, is it worth it? Is it too late? Has technology caught up? And so maybe you'll be looking for a job, but you won't have one in the year's time. You know, what's the deal with this? I just thought I'd share my two cents, what I've seen, what I continue to see in this industry and with the technology. So in conclusion, if you are starting out as a freelance translator right now, I fervently believe that you have a long career ahead of you and you'll be fine for many, many years to come. I wouldn't worry too much about that. And when people bring it up, you can point, I mean, point to this video, you can point to the examples I gave, or you can just say, don't worry about it, I'll be fine. Thanks for your concern. Anyway, that's it. I hope you found this useful or at least interesting. I'll be back later with more videos, probably my next video will be about health insurance. Anyway, I'll talk to you then. Don't forget to subscribe if you want more information about being a freelancer, freelance translator. And yeah, I'll see you in the next video. Thanks. Bye. Pretty much all I'm going to do.