When you spend
your 9-5 (or your 5-9 – after all, isn’t one of the benefits of freelancing
being able to choose your own hours?) providing professional translation services,
it can be easy to dismiss and even deride the largely inferior results of
machine translation systems. However, the technology is advancing rapidly and
does have its place within the wider translation industry.
Convenience over translation quality
It is
unrealistic, for example, to expect someone to sit in a restaurant while on
holiday and engage a professional translation agency to read the menu for them
between the time they sit down and the time the server arrives to take their
order. Yes, machine translation isn’t yet good enough to be a reliable provider
of business translation services, but that doesn’t
mean it’s not without its uses.
Sticking with
the restaurant example, the modern diner has a range of smartphone camera
translation apps available to them to aid in their gastronomic experience. This
opens up the possibility of their going to a restaurant where they don’t just
not speak the language but where they aren’t even familiar with the writing
system, and yet still being able to order competently and choose something they
like. Assuming, of course, that the app in question is up to the task!
Camera translation app roundup
The experts
over at GearBrain recently
decided to put such apps to the test, with some interesting results…
The Google
Translate app presented some rather indecisive word choices when Chinese
writing was viewed through the camera, with small hand movements seemingly
changing the app’s mind about which words it was looking at. However, taking a
picture within the app and using Google’s AI cloud for translation proved much
more effective – enough to aid with ordering from a menu, where the read aloud
functionality can also come in handy. The app’s handwritten Chinese
translation was somewhat more hit and miss, but for a freely available app it’s
certainly not a bad tool to help holidaymakers get by.
