Can you even in good faith call it MTPE if...
Thread poster: Adieu
Adieu
Adieu  Identity Verified
Ukrainian to English
+ ...
Feb 4, 2021

1) The document has literally 0% full, partial, or fuzzy segment matches. Actual 0.00%. Either they have no translation memory for the subject whatsoever or they didn't use it.

2) Whatever generic translation memory was applied to it lacked terminology for medical abbreviations, phonetically transcribed key terminology (tons of mistakes in brand and chemical names coming from cyrillic), and even introduced regular spelling mistakes?

Is it reasonable to tell a client who
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1) The document has literally 0% full, partial, or fuzzy segment matches. Actual 0.00%. Either they have no translation memory for the subject whatsoever or they didn't use it.

2) Whatever generic translation memory was applied to it lacked terminology for medical abbreviations, phonetically transcribed key terminology (tons of mistakes in brand and chemical names coming from cyrillic), and even introduced regular spelling mistakes?

Is it reasonable to tell a client who does a mix of translation and MTPE jobs that this simply doesn't QUALIFY to be called MTPE, because one click on any CAT tool with no memories or terminologies or dialing in whatsoever will yield the same output or better vs. what they sent me?
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Jessica Noyes
Jessica Noyes  Identity Verified
United States
Local time: 17:44
Member
Spanish to English
+ ...
Possibly help your client Feb 4, 2021

I ran into this myself recently. It doesn't sound as if it was as bad as yours, but, for example, in a lease it translated "vivienda" (the leased residence) as 'house', 'home', and 'dwelling'. Sometimes these were capitalized, sometimes not.

It occurred to me tell my client about this, because perhaps he was paying for a crummy machine translation without realizing it. (Certainly my CAT tool could have done better). Maybe he was being defrauded in a way, by whoever did the MT. So w
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I ran into this myself recently. It doesn't sound as if it was as bad as yours, but, for example, in a lease it translated "vivienda" (the leased residence) as 'house', 'home', and 'dwelling'. Sometimes these were capitalized, sometimes not.

It occurred to me tell my client about this, because perhaps he was paying for a crummy machine translation without realizing it. (Certainly my CAT tool could have done better). Maybe he was being defrauded in a way, by whoever did the MT. So when he passed it on to me as MTPE, he didn't know of the extent of the corrections that would need to be made.

So, if you do inform your client, you could consider doing so with a collegial attitude, rather than from a place of frustration and resentment.

(TW, I am not against MTPE work in itself, especially for rote-type documents. I have edited some very good MTPE projects in the past. In these "neural" machine translations, the accuracy was very high, and the rate I received turned out to be fair enough.)
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Adieu
Adieu  Identity Verified
Ukrainian to English
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
Not the case here Feb 4, 2021

Jessica Noyes wrote:

I ran into this myself recently. It doesn't sound as if it was as bad as yours, but, for example, in a lease it translated "vivienda" (the leased residence) as 'house', 'home', and 'dwelling'. Sometimes these were capitalized, sometimes not.

It occurred to me tell my client about this, because perhaps he was paying for a crummy machine translation without realizing it. (Certainly my CAT tool could have done better). Maybe he was being defrauded in a way, by whoever did the MT. So when he passed it on to me as MTPE, he didn't know of the extent of the corrections that would need to be made.

So, if you do inform your client, you could consider doing so with a collegial attitude, rather than from a place of frustration and resentment.

(TW, I am not against MTPE work in itself, especially for rote-type documents. I have edited some very good MTPE projects in the past. In these "neural" machine translations, the accuracy was very high, and the rate I received turned out to be fair enough.)






This is a big pharma company that usually just pays for translations and/or MTPE to keep tabs on what their foreign subsidiaries are up to. MT is done in-house.

For routine bureaucratic paperwork correspondence, I have to grudgingly admit that their MT is pretty solid. MTPE actually goes faster and ends up paying somewhat more per hour.

For anything outside that box? This was Russian government regulator guidance on coronavirus treatment.... and the MT even managed to misspell COVID-19. In English.

A truly noteworthy achievement.



[Edited at 2021-02-04 14:28 GMT]


 
Jean Dimitriadis
Jean Dimitriadis  Identity Verified
English to French
+ ...
  Feb 4, 2021

You are a freelancer, you don't have to accept anything (in good faith or otherwise).

Just systematically ask to review the source and MT output prior to committing to a new project.

If you feel that the previously agreed rate cannot be applied for a particular job or that the source text/MT output is not a good match for MTPE, you can always refuse the job or offer an alternative (like full-rate translation), briefly explaining the reasons.

[Edited at 2021-02-05
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You are a freelancer, you don't have to accept anything (in good faith or otherwise).

Just systematically ask to review the source and MT output prior to committing to a new project.

If you feel that the previously agreed rate cannot be applied for a particular job or that the source text/MT output is not a good match for MTPE, you can always refuse the job or offer an alternative (like full-rate translation), briefly explaining the reasons.

[Edited at 2021-02-05 15:44 GMT]
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Jorge Payan
Laura Kingdon
 


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Can you even in good faith call it MTPE if...







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