What is Machine Translation Post-Editing (MTPE)?

MT refers to the software technology that automates translation.

Machine Translation Post-Editing (MTPE) is a process designed to save you time and cost involved in translation. It has two components. In the first, the source content is translated by a machine translation software. In the second, a human editor improves the translation of the machine. In the end, you leverage both: the power of artificial intelligence and the hard-to-replicate human expertise.

Not advisable. MT can guarantee faster turnout but it cannot guarantee 100% accuracy or consistency. Also, machine translated content may not have a natural flow. So, you should not rely on MT 100% when it comes to quality.

The translation done by any software is never 100% accurate and consistent. Hence, you need a human professional editor to check the translation done by the machine against the original content. Only a human editor can make a translation sound natural to your customers, vendors, employees, and so on.

The result? Translation that will help you engage with your clients or business partners in no time, and speak directly to their needs in a natural way.

Artificial Intelligence has vastly improved the ability of a computer to translate. This has boosted the adoption of MT across the world. Giants like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, Alibaba and language tech companies like Systran, Lilt, and DeepL are expanding the horizon of MT. Even regional tech companies such as Baidu in China and Yandex in Russia are building up MT capabilities.

Online machine translation tools like Google Translate and Bing Translator are used every day by millions of people around the world to translate billions of words in more than a 100 languages.

Machine Translation, also known as "Automatic Translation", is not a new technology in the first place. It has been around since the days after World War II. So far, there have been three major MT systems.

• The first generation of MT systems are based on a set of grammar rules. They were known as "Rule-Based Machine Translation" systems. It was a good start but the output made the source text hardly understandable.
• The second generation of MT was based on statistical models. The technology analysed large bilingual text corpora consisting of translations of human translators. With this knowledge, the MT software identified possible matches of words and phrases between two given languages. The accuracy of statistical MT tools was better than that of rule-based models but not fully usable
• Now, we are using the third generation of MT. Known as Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems, MT now works like the neurons of our brain!
• Instead of analyzing words and phrases separately, NMT system analyzes entire sentences just like human brains do. The earlier tools analyzed sentences only partially. They could generate translations only at a word or phrase level. But NMT grasps a whole sentence, and generates more accurate and naturally sounding translations.
• Another advantage of NMT is its ability to ‘learn' on its own. The learning algorithms, developed by AI experts, make a NMT system to constantly improve its ability on its own using huge parallel corpora of previously translated content in language pairs. As technology stands today, MT guarantees an accuracy of about 90% or more.

NMT systems are almost a miracle, a dream come true for the humankind. NMT already demolished the language barrier for millions of people.

Today one can talk in his or her own language and let a NMT gadget capture the voice and instantly translate it to the listeners in their languages. Machine Translation is here to stay.

Yes, you can (unless your hands are tied). But should you? Probably not. Why? Because it can be risky.

Here are some types of texts you shouldn't translate using a machine:

• Creative texts-used in culturally specific marketing environments or fiction-are not suitable for MT. Yes, the machines are "mechanical": they can't feel the text and emotions.
• Legally sensitive texts should not be machine-translated. If your translation is meant to be used in a legal setting (say, in a court or police station), please check with your local authorities to make sure MTPE is accepted in your jurisdiction.
• Medical records should not be translated using an MT software. MT is not always accurate, and this could have negative consequences in a patient's life.

Ailaysa always has your best interests in its mind. For this reason, whenever you feel that MT will do more harm than good for you, we will react immediately. You will receive an email that reads something like this: "Hi, your content is not acceptable for MT. We found lots of errors in the translation generated by the MT software; the translation should be done by a human translator". If you wish, we can give you some samples of the output for you to judge for yourself.

Sounds too risky? No problem! Just send us an email and we will provide the best solution for your needs.

Even after many decades of research and development, MT is still an emerging technology. For this reason, many languages are still either under-supported or not supported at all by this technology. But the good news is that MT is fast adding new languages.

Ailaysa uses many state-of-the-art MT engines developed by various companies. Ailaysa doesn't develop any AI engine. It simply uses the tools that best meet your needs.

The type of MT software to be used will depend on language pairs and subject matter.

Our editors who provide post-editing services are professional translators. They specialize in editing the output of MT software.

Even the most sophisticated MT engine can't generate 100% accurate translations for you. And that's where our editors step in. They use their skills, expertise, and experience to the following tasks:

• Eliminate grammatical and syntactic errors
• Guaranteeing that no sentence, phrase or piece of information is lost in the translation
• Enhancing the style so that your message appeals to your target audience
• Making sure that the edited text is culturally and legally appropriate
• Making sure the correct terminology is used consistently throughout the text
• Using proper spelling, style and punctuation.

Ailaysa’s Machine Translation Post-Editing costs you less than what any human translation services anywhere in the world do. As we leverage MT's intelligence, the human effort in translation is that much reduced. This results in cost saving - up to one third of the cost or more.