Machine Translation for Reach, Human Translation For Revenue

机器翻译促进Reach,人工翻译促进收入

2020-08-19 22:10 Nimdzi Insights

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Do you remember the last time when people were NOT talking about machine translation (MT)? We don't. Wherever you go, there’s someone talking about MT. With few exceptions, it seems like the only major disruptors in our industry over the past few decades have been breakthroughs in language technology. However, as we discussed in a previous Nimdzi report, the hype is not completely justified, at least not in any way that is clear and apparent. Nimdzi surveyed 33 localization buyers to ask them if they were currently using neural machine translation (NMT) in their organizations. The replies confirmed that NMT is not as widely adopted as one may be led to believe. Is NMT widely used in your company? Source: Nimdzi Insights In this survey, 77.4 percent of buyer-side localization managers responded that NMT is far from being fully adopted within their organizations. What’s more, 33 percent said NMT isn’t being used at all. This brings us to the next question: are all industries benefiting from MT? It’s been widely discussed that industries such as video games, media, and marketing don’t make much use of MT technology because they usually require more creativity and cultural awareness and sensitivity. And machines don’t seem to be on par with humans yet in this regard. In the games industry, specifically, there have been a few attempts to include MT in the localization workflow. For example, Electronic Arts (EA) was an early adopter of this technology and has learned how to make the most of it, even in a creative industry. In an article published in the magazine MultiLingual titled “The future is here: Neural machine translation for games,” MT specialist Cristina Anselmi and localization veteran Inés Rubio shared their insightful experience implementing MT in the game localization workflow. In the article, the authors shared a table with the different areas and content types at EA where MT is applied. Categorization of types of text at Electronic Arts. Source: MultiLingual As we can see, most of the text categories where raw MT is implemented don’t have a checkmark in the category “Sentiment,” meaning it’s not content that has a direct impact on players’ emotional engagement. Game content and websites do have a direct impact on players’ experience. In these cases, EA uses post-edited machine translation, ensuring the final text is carefully reviewed by a human translator. And on top of that, they use this workflow only for titles with low ROI for specific languages or in low impact locales with low ROI.  EA has developed a very smart way to use MT to streamline their processes without having a negative impact on the quality of their players’ experience. This system shows that they are extremely mature in the way they understand their content and its impact on their users. But this also supports what we see as a clear mantra for the industry: Machine translation for reach, human translation for revenue. EA’s use case is just one example of how MT may be used for locales or products that are perhaps less important for a company at a given time, or even for content that doesn’t have a direct impact on the quality of experience of end users. MT certainly has its uses for customer support or documentation content that is not highly relevant for the actual gamer experience. But, when the revenue of a company is at stake, companies usually prefer to go with human translation, especially in creative industries such as media and game localization. So when planning to implement MT in your organization, first seek to understand the true importance of the content you’re generating and its impact on your revenue, then design a localization strategy accordingly. If you want to communicate with your customers and engage them, you may still want to use a human instead of a machine, don’t you think?
你还记得上一次人们不在谈论机器翻译(MT)的时候吗?我们不记得。无论你走到哪里,总有人在谈论MT。除了少数例外,在过去的几十年里,语言技术的突破似乎是我们这个行业唯一的主要颠覆者。 然而,正如我们在之前的一份尼姆齐报告中所讨论的那样,这种炒作并不完全正当,至少在任何明确而明显的方面都是如此。Nimdzi调查了33名本地化买家,询问他们目前是否在组织中使用神经机器翻译(NMT)。这些答复证实,NMT并不像人们可能认为的那样得到广泛采用。 NMT在贵公司是否得到广泛应用? 资料来源:Nimdzi Insights 在这次调查中,77.4%的买方本地化经理回答说,NMT在他们的组织中还远没有被完全采用。更重要的是,33%的人说NMT根本没有被使用。 这就引出了下一个问题:是否所有行业都从MT中受益?人们普遍认为,视频游戏,媒体和市场营销等行业并没有太多地使用MT技术,因为它们通常需要更多的创造力,文化意识和敏感性。并且在这方面,机器似乎还不能与人类相提并论。 具体来说,在游戏行业,已经有一些尝试将MT纳入本地化工作流程。例如,电子艺界(EA)是这项技术的早期采用者,并且已经学会了如何充分利用它,即使是在一个创意产业中也是如此。在《多语言》杂志上发表的一篇题为《未来就在这里:面向游戏的神经机器翻译》的文章中,MT专家Cristina Anselmi和本地化资深人士Inés Rubio分享了他们在游戏本地化工作流程中实现MT的富有洞察力的经验。在本文中,作者与EA中应用MT的不同区域和内容类型共享了一个表。 电子艺界的文本类型分类。资料来源:多语种 正如我们所看到的,大多数实现了原始MT的文本类别中都没有“情感”这一类别的复选标记,这意味着并不是内容对玩家的情感投入有直接影响。游戏内容和网站确实对玩家的体验有直接影响。在这些情况下,EA使用编辑后的机器翻译,确保最终文本由人类译者仔细审阅。此外,他们只对特定语言的低ROI的标题或低ROI的低影响地区使用此工作流。 EA开发了一种非常聪明的方式,利用MT来精简他们的流程,而不会对他们玩家的体验质量产生负面影响。这个系统表明他们在理解其内容及其对其用户的影响的方式上是极其成熟的。但这也支持了我们所看到的行业的一个明确的咒语: 机器翻译是为了达到目的,人工翻译是为了增加收入。 EA的用例只是一个例子,说明了如何将MT用于在给定时间对公司来说不太重要的地区或产品,甚至用于对最终用户的体验质量没有直接影响的内容。MT当然有它的客户支持或文档内容的用途,这些内容与实际玩家的体验并不高度相关。但是,当一个公司的收入受到威胁时,公司通常更倾向于采用人工翻译,尤其是在媒体和游戏本地化等创意行业。 因此,当计划在您的组织中实施MT时,首先要了解您正在生成的内容的真正重要性及其对收入的影响,然后相应地设计本地化策略。如果你想和你的客户沟通并接触他们,你可能还是想用人类而不是机器,你不觉得吗?

以上中文文本为机器翻译,存在不同程度偏差和错误,请理解并参考英文原文阅读。

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