Translations: Are Human Translators preferred in Dubai?
The desire to spread your business globally has created the need for you to communicate in a language that people in foreign lands understand. It is the need to convey the right and reliable message to someone whose language you may not know but want to connect with. It is your need to reach out to a wider audience and grow more financially.
There are thousands of translation companies who are there to help you along the way. They offer to translate your information into foreign languages for your wider audiences to access. In Dubai too, you will find local translation services in Dubai and other cities who can translate materials into French, German, Spanish, Italian, and other world languages. These companies employ locals who are experts in Arabic as well as these foreign languages.
But, the demand for such translation companies in Dubai, UAE has grown so much that machines have stepped in to support these services. They work faster and take on large columns of work for clients. These machines also stand by in times of emergency or last minute work assignments. This reduces the costs of translations too. Computers can translate data, text, audios, and visual labels, subtitles and much more into multiple languages and are accessible to remote areas as well.
Despite these features, there are still inhibitions in relying totally on computers and such translation tools. Let us see some of the reasons for this.
- Reference to Context
Verbal and written information is so vast that many words and phrases are repeated in their use, but carry different meanings in different contexts. Words like run, order, bear, etc have multiple uses and can confuse the computer translation tools. A machine could translate the word into another language without analyzing whether the word has been used as a noun or a verb or even an adjective. In spoken messages like conferences, lectures, telephonic conversations, the simple machines can also make the error of interpreting homonyms or similar sounding words. For instance: see and sea, fair and fare, there and their, etc. These errors in machine translation change the meaning of the message drastically. It becomes necessary for a language expert to read the entire translation and make the changes were needed for the correct reference to context. - Cultural Context
The same words carry different connotations in different regions and cultures. Some words which are pleasant and positive in one culture may be offending in another. The machine translation tools do not know the local culture of the region and what is acceptable or meaningful there. Such translations may not be logical in the meaning or flow of the documents. It’s only the human translators who can read and use the words in the cultural context. If the translator is a local of any region or culture, it is even better as he or she would know exactly what the speaker or writer means and what the locals understand from the message. Thus, machines do make these errors and need human intervention for translations. - Emotions and Feelings
When a speaker speaks at a meeting, educational forum, workshops, seminar or other such platforms, he will use language expressions to express his feelings and emotions. When you get this work interpreted and translated by a language expert, you will get the correct message across. On the other hand, machine translators will not be able to catch these emotions and abstract feelings. They will only focus on the word to word or phrase to phrase translations losing out on real communication. - Abstract Communication
Similarly, when a speaker speaks or when people communicate verbally or through the written medium, they often use abstract communication. They use expressions like hmmm, oho, aha, oh no, etc. They even pause for creating effect or convey expressions of thought processes. A machine cannot understand these abstractions as it has no feelings like humans do. It will only translate meaningful words, and either omit translating these feelings or makes errors in translations. Therefore, a professional needs to do justice to the translations. You cannot leave it to the computer tools to give accurate translations. Clients do want human intervention. - Need for Multiple languages
It is a very expensive proposition to translate matter into one foreign language and leave it at that. You may need translations into multiple languages. Getting future translations becomes very expensive. It is thus better to translate data or information into multiple languages if you have any plans of reaching out to more than one foreign land. It is a herculean task to feed different language words, phrases, cultural colloquialisms into multiple local machines for different languages. It is very difficult for a computer to pick up and recognize the dialects and pronunciations of various larger and sublanguages. You may need work from multiple machines that are fixed for local languages. They have to be updated regularly to keep pace with newer words, accents, and phrases as people of that region will make these changes and use them in speeches and presentations. A resident from that region will be a better translator and will need to edit on the machine output. - Style and Tone
The written text only constitutes a small part of communication. The verbal messages are much more. These could be lectures, conferences, telephonic conversations, workshops, advertisements, meetings, videos, etc. In each of these, the speaker uses different tones and voice modulations. It is next to impossible for a machine translator to know all the styles, intonations, and voice modulations of the verbal communications. Many a message may be lost because the machine focuses more on word to word or phrase to phrase translation. On the other hand, the language expert will understand the feelings and emotions behind all these intonations and do justice to the translations. Therefore, even the translation companies prefer human intervention to get the accuracy of the messages being conveyed.
Human translators can keep the mood, tone, and style of different genres of information. These include humor, sarcasm, plea, commands and requests, serious sermons, horror, and much more. They can also take good care of translations of essays, poetry, dramas, narratives, and other forms of expression. Machines would probably do a flat and standard translation of information. - Formatting and Editing
Human intervention is also important before the final product is rolled out to the clients as minor changes can be done to suit the local culture of the region being reached out to. This is especially where sub-languages are being targeted. The contextual meanings can be altered by professions working in these translation companies. Machine translators can never do this for you.While the computers are a great tool for formatting the written text and getting it ready for printing or publishing, the translated materials do need the final look by the human translators. This takes care of punctuations too as a comma, for example, may convey a different meaning if placed in different parts of a sentence. A human language expert will place the comma and other punctuation marks in the correct place to convey the accurate meaning behind the data. All translation service providers in the Dubai, European countries, and Asian regions as well have a team of proofreaders who polish and finish the product in the best possible manner. They check the grammar, the punctuation, the sentence formations, feelings, and abstract emotions, etc. So, even after a computer has finished its task of translating the matter, the human intervention that ends the process of translation. - Speed and Cost Analysis
Though there are several online translation tools and services available to you, yet you need to choose wisely. These tools will translate your matter faster, almost instantaneously. Due to its speed, it is much cheaper to take the help of machines rather than humans to do your translations. This is especially beneficial and logical if you have thousands of pages or manuals that have to be translated and also the number of dialects you are targeting for business expansion.
Yet, you may not get the exact reference to context and culture through them. You do need the human brainpower which may take longer but will surely give you the precise and contextual translation. Machine tools will translate a word or phrase in real-time, yet you may not know the correct use as mentioned above, one word may convey different meanings in usage.
Machine translation services in Dubai, UAE cannot be ideally used as a one stop solution. They aren’t flawless and may require help from humans.Since languages are complex in terms of their terminology, mother tongue influences, cultural acceptance, and reference to the context, there has to be a healthy combination of computer translations and language experts’ intervention. Choose the translation service according to your need, the volumes you require, the number of languages you want to intervene, and of course your budget for the translations.
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