The Value of Machine Translation for the Professional Translator
Elina Lagoudaki · 2008
More and more Translation Memory (TM) systems nowadays are fortified with machine translation (MT) techniques to enable them to propose a translation to the translator when no match is found in his TM resources. The sys-tem attempts this by assembling a combina-tion of terms from its terminology database, translations from its memory, and even por-tions of them. This paper reviews the most popular commercial TM systems with inte-grated MT techniques and explores their use-fulness based on the perceived practical benefits brought to their users. Feedback from translators reveals a variety of attitudes to-wards machine translation, with some sup-porting and others contradicting several points of conventional wisdom regarding the rela-tionship between machine translation and hu-man translators. 1