Advances in telecommunications have significantly reduced distances. We are moving fast towards the concept of a “global village”, yet the barriers to communication and understanding remain strong.
What is the reason?
First of all, thousands of natural, native languages are spoken around the world. The need to communicate therefore forces people to learn new foreign languages and obliges developers to create new technological applications that ensure mutual understanding and access to shared knowledge. Multilingualism has become the rule. Companies, organizations and schools are likewise multinational and diverse. Global citizens want to communicate across language borders.
Language technology
The user’s experience of the virtual environment in an interactive, multimedia and multilingual way is not possible without language technology. It enables the development of applications such as machine translation, content generation, information processing and knowledge management for all languages. Although this technology has developed considerably, it still needs to be perfected before it can be used fully. For now, such software is useful to a translator for quickly generating a reasonable rendering of the text of a document.
The art of translation
The semantic content of the message in any text is the challenge for the “translating machine”. Producing texts without linguistic nuance, metaphor or emotional charge results in a bland text. Can the emotional side of a text resonate in any way with the robot that manufactures translations? Researchers are asking themselves this too. We do not ignore the fact that they have come quite far, but not to the point where the performance of good translators is surpassed by technology.
The translation team at Syncro Translation Services guarantees respect for the cultural realities of all translated materials. For us, translation means creation, even when the field is technical. We adapt the text, we understand wordplay and we translate verse into verse.
In conclusion, the metaphors and emotional components of some texts lie beyond the words and emerge only from context. They cannot be translated word for word. No software can achieve this kind of adaptation of a text – only a human translator can.