Machine translation vs. crowdsourcing in medical translation (poll)
Written by ForeignExchange Translations on Monday, May 10, 2010
It seems like a day does not go by without some news about companies using crowdsourced translations or some new machine translation improvement. Today alone I read about software powerhouse Adobe testing crowdsourcing in China and DocTranslator bringing further improvements to automatic in-browser translation.
So far software and social media companies have taken the lead on crowdsourcing. And machine translation still requires a big up-front investment, relegating it primarily to the real of "really big" organizations.
But it's only a matter of time until a pharmaceutical or medical device company deploys one or both of these technologies. And why not? For instance, as drug and device companies (slowly) become more active in social media, their international audience will look for local-language support - and will be happy to help.
It's too early to tell whether this will be bad news or good news to service providers. Chances are, it will be a bit of both. But one thing that is certain, is that these technologies will be highly disruptive for providers of medical translation services.
What's your take on this? Which of these developments will prove to be more disruptive in the area of medical translation?
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If you go on this way, I think I'll stop reading your blog because nearly everyday you announce a potential catastroph.
After the Greek crisis impact on the Pharma industry, now this disquieting perspective.
Have you decided to demoralize the whole army of medical translators? :-D
Afa I'm concerned, I'll keep optimistic. And you should too.
In fact, our outlook is 100% optimistic. Sure, there are challenges out there but I am convinced that they present terrific opportunities for many translation providers.
Having said that, I also think that the translation industry is overdue for a shake-out. Too many service providers have had it too easy for too long. I don't know what event will serve as the catalyst but again, ultimately, I think it will be a good thing for our industry.
In the mean time, we'll make an effort to be more positive :-)
On the other hand, this doesn't sound like they are going to be the most authoritative ones. Others will be using one of these + other language services that can only be rendered by specialists only. It will also depend on their budgets or their will or their respect for their audiences.
Maybe all this will give us more chance to provide other kinds of language services.
As for your poll, sorry: I can't tell. Time will tell. Look, the crowd is not made up of specialists and machines are not human. Then...neither of them is good enough. Don't you think?
As a reader I'll start to do something and whenever I have the feeling some content was produced by any of these two I will be sending and email or commenting in their blog or something "Sorry, but the content is not clear enough. Maybe you need a human professional translator."
Not all content needs protecting, but I think particularly with Medical Translations, much of it does. Most of these technologies, by default, publicly shares the content or at a minimum shares it with a 3rd party which might not be under a non-disclosure contract (e.g. Google Translate).
As in my case because my language pairs are English <>Spanish I have a broader latitude because of so many variations exist at this time. We need to learn to use the programs in order to be competitive.
Thanks for giving me this heads up!
Articles I have authored on Crowdsourcing:
www.tcworld.info/index.php?id=117
www.multilingual.com/articleDetail.php?id=1673
Kind regards,
Adam.
We have posted a follow-up article that contains poll results.
Thank you all for your comments and votes!
I don't think that crowd-sourcing (I prefer call it crow-scorching ;-))) or MT will be disruptive in our field, but rather that these tools (as every tool of ours) is a boomerang in unskilled hands
regards