Is translation software really worth it?

It's all very well to learn a foreign language and make yourself understandable in it (you can usually manage the latter even if your command of the foreign language is not perfect). But people from all walks of life agree that having a wide vocabulary and excellent grammatical skills in a foreign language alone just does not warrant one being called a professional translator.

...Little wonder, when even professional translators are often fazed by the idea of translating complex professional documents - patents and tax legislation are a couple of examples that I think of off the top of my head. If it were not enough that those reading those translations expect total clarity and coherence at all times and not to be left confused with regard to cultural and stylistic factors and expectations, terminology / jargon issues often prove to be a minefield to the person commissioned to do the translation task. There have been cases of big business deals just falling apart due to bad translation work: either as a result of the translator's misunderstanding of the original text or of the translator using distorted language when composing the translation product.

Of course, that does not prevent professional companies seeking translations of important material, from stating tight deadlines in the advertisement of the work to translators. This would explain the popularity of all these "translation software" packages - from Trados and SDLX to Wordfast and Wordpro to Globalink and Systran (the company SDL International is a good place to purchase these - a link to their website http://www.sdl.com/). To be perfectly honest, I am far from an expert in any of these, although I do remember using them a little bit when I studied translation in a postgraduate degree course at the University of Portsmouth. (The fact that the text files for these software packages have unique extensions, would only make it seem even more of a challenge to become competent in their use.)

I envision creators of translation software pointing out that it "will help considerably" if the document to be translated is particularly long, or if it clearly has a high emphasis on terminology. Well excuse me for being so blunt, but I regard translation software with unparalleled skepticism. Why do I say this? It's so simple, really. A machine cannot create or imagine like a human can (even if the human is not what you would call "bright").

Those not convinced will now witness an episode of imagination in action, defying the alleged promise of translation software. If you type "lead" into a machine translator, ordering that it translate it into French, would you get "plomb" or a permutation of the verb "diriger"? In other words, would you get the French name for the element with the chemical symbol "Pb", or would you get an approximation of the verb "to lead" (or "to direct"?). Whatever the answer would be, are we supposed to believe that the machine will differentiate between the two meanings depending on the context in which that four-letter word (not lexical item - word) is found?

Then there is the fact that basic grammar often varies from language to language. For example, "I have been going" makes sense in English, but the nearest literal translation in French - which I believe to be "J'ai été allant" - certainly does not.

I have yet to be convinced that machine translations - good or bad, easily understandable or barely comprehensible, accurate or inaccurate - are in any way oriented by notions of stylistic consistency. The premise of persuasion would be a good example of stylistic consistency. While no business presentation is 100% complete without an element of persuasion and throughout, it just does not make sense to try and factor the same into a terms and conditions document.

I hope that I have made my opinion on translation software very clear. I think it is mostly redundant because I believe that the most important tools for good translation are traits that every single person has - I am not just talking about the "building blocks" that are individual words; I am also talking about being able to be creative, use imagination, improvise. And, even if the individual's imagination only stretches so far, given that the act of translation is not just about understanding but also producing, isn't that what translation is really all about? When you next translate something, don't obsess so much over all the universally accepted rules and the disputed rules of the languages that it actually gets in the way of getting the message - as long as it is the right message - across to the reader of the translation. The truth is - and this is the truth - that many professional translation agencies adopt a policy of having every translated product proofread / finalised by another native speaker of the target language (the language being translated into). Even though no English person would say "try bigger and bigger" (seen on road a sign in Tokyo), surely you don't have to ask questions to get the gist of that?

I have a BA French and German and I studied translation at postgraduate level; and I have been a professional freelance translator since October 2008. I have read poor English written by French or German natives and independently identified exactly what it was that resulted in the (false) use of certain words or phrases.