Machine Translation a a tool

In the battle between man and machine, man seems to be on the losing side. Since Henry Ford invented the assembly line, machines rule in most fields where stamina, brute force or precision are required. Luckily, more intellectual challenges were still won by man. Until Deep Blue beat Kasparov at chess and Watson won at Jeopardy… Now the machines are at the gate of one of man’s final strongholds: natural language. Fight or flee! Or should we consider to open the gate and co-exist peacefully? More than ever, Machine Translation (MT) is a controversial topic. Translators without thorough knowledge of MT often feel threatened. All too often, this leads to emotional pleas to save their trade rather than a rational discussion based on economic factors. This workshop is an attempt to rationalise the debate: we consider MT to be just another tool, just like computers, electronic dictionaries and translation memories. We will set up a small-scale experiment to see if MT and increases productivity. A translation assignment is split into three parts: the first part of a translation project will be translated from scratch, the second part with output from Google Translate and the third section with a custom MT engine. This workshop is based on an experiment at KU Leuven. Postgraduate students (http://www.arts.kuleuven.be/home/opleidingen/manamas/emt/index) translated a similar (larger) project. Time and quality of the three parts were compared. The results will be shown during the workshop.status: publishe