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]