The Secret Sauce of Translation

As machine translation post-editing has become increasingly popular with clients wanting to save time and money, some seem to have difficulty understanding why I decline such projects, despite my best attempts to explain all of the work that goes into a translation.  

So instead, let’s imagine that I’m a chef at your favorite restaurant, where you always order pasta with my homemade tomato sauce. Making the sauce requires a variety of time-honed skills and knowledge: developing a recipe, sourcing the ingredients and knowing how to adapt when their flavor varies, knowing how to use and cook the ingredients, monitoring cooking times and kitchen safety, and so on. 

You’ve always been happy with the service I provide and you love my sauce, but one day you decide that you should be able to get the sauce cheaper and faster. You walk in with a jar of the cheapest tomato sauce at the grocery store and ask me to improve it so that it tastes just like my homemade sauce. Surely it won’t take nearly as much time as cooking it from scratch, and using the jarred sauce instead of starting with fresh ingredients should decrease the cost as well. So you have a proposition: you’ll give me the jarred sauce to start with, and in exchange, you’ll pay me a fraction of the price once I’ve successfully turned it into my homemade sauce. You say it will be a great deal for me because the time saved will translate into increased output, and I’ll be able to get rich selling my delicious sauce in bulk. 

The whole idea is ridiculous, isn’t it? You obviously can’t just hand a chef a jar of store-bought sauce and expect them to magically transform it into their special recipe. The cheap store-bought sauce surely contains preservatives, plus any number of mysterious ingredients and additives that impact its flavor. It may contain lots of rosemary, while the chef’s recipe uses none. It would require considerable time and skill for the chef to refine the store-bought sauce so that it met their standards, but even then, it could never be the same as theirs. So many unknowns were introduced into the process by starting with the jarred sauce that they have no way of knowing if they were able to correct for them. For that matter, they cannot even guarantee that the sauce is safe for everyone who consumes it, since they don’t know all of the ingredients or how they were prepared. 

That is what it feels like when clients provide a translation generated by AI and ask for it to be “refined” so that it achieves the same high quality as a professional translation done by a human. It is excruciatingly frustrating work that generally takes much more time and effort than translating the text on your own. In exchange, you are offered considerably less money and the knowledge that you are furthering the demise of your industry, sacrificing quality and human ingenuity in favor of making a handful of companies richer. No thanks!