Adopting a Hybrid Approach For Document Translation 


Document translation is one important domain of the translation industry. The market of document translation is said to be standing around 10.3 billion USD in the previous years, and anticipated to reach 16.10 billion in the coming years as experts and analysts suggest. As the language service industry sets to grow and become even larger, document translation services have emerged to be an important sector of it. With businesses interacting and communicating with their business associates on a bigger scale, the need for accurate document translation services online or manually has accelerated. Document translation is an integral part of personal, professional, and business operations. The businesses in particular have to seek translation services for their important business documents before expanding their operations to a new land.

A lot of companies prefer using machine translation tools for document translation, however, a hybrid approach may make more difference. The hybrid approach, combining machine translation (MT) with human post-editing, has emerged as the most practical method for document translation.

Optimal balance of speed and accuracy

Going for the hybrid approach particularly proves beneficial for an optimal balance of speed and accuracy.

Leveraging technology

Machine translation has emerged as an important tool for helping with the better generation of initial drafts. It also reduces the turnaround times, which otherwise could have taken longer, delaying the overall process.

Human expertise

Human expertise plays its part by refining the MT output while also ensuring accuracy, cultural appropriateness, and adherence to the style guidelines. Machine translation could struggle to make the content fit in a particular format and make it culturally relevant. Therefore, only human translators could do it.

Cost-efficiency

The combination of machine translation and human expertise also proves to be economical and cost-effective while maintaining a balance between speed and accuracy which leads to high-quality machine translation.

Improved efficiency and scalability

Translation has become important for every type of field and niche. This has also made its way to learning institutes and elearning translation services got quite in demand post-COVID-19. There are many documents that are often sent for translation. A hybrid approach is also popular among institutes for translating the elearning content and documents due to improved efficiency and scalability.

Increased productivity

A hybrid approach improves productivity. MT is especially popular for its capacity to handle large volumes of text at one time. This makes room for the human translators to focus on other important factors which particularly include complex and nuanced content that requires consideration.

Scalability also gets better when businesses adopt a hybrid approach to document translation. It also enables accommodating different project sizes and deadlines accordingly.

Enhanced quality

Quality is an integral part of document translation and cannot be compromised. Using machine tools along with the human brain assists in achieving the quality that is required in the document translation. Human touch is extremely crucial to maintaining quality. Their post-editing services guarantee that the content in the documents is accurate and culturally appropriate. It further helps with improved consistency across all languages. Moreover, when it comes to contextual understanding, MT tools are certainly not a good choice to rely on. Humans, on the other hand, excel at understanding the text’s context and can incorporate their information accordingly. Developing a contextual understanding leads to an accurate translation.

Risk Mitigation

Using machine tools along with human translators contributes to reducing the risk. There is less risk involved which may occur in the form of more errors. The errors get a few in case of opting for the hybrid approach. Though machine translation has been improving lately human intervention needs to be there to identify, spot, and correct errors. The brand protection also gets better with a hybrid approach. It safeguards the reputation and also ensures quality translation. Errors in the documents can lead to inaccuracies, making the documents null and void wasting money and resources. 

Flexibility

Being flexible in the translation process can help to achieve more accurate and long-lasting results and impact. The hybrid model comes with adaptability. Also, it helps to make adjustments according to project requirements, budget, and language pairs. This can especially depend on the language pair. Machine translation has an accuracy of up to 90% for some languages, whereas it could stumble in the case of some other languages.

Moreover, many times companies have to deal with diverse documents that may get robotic and plain translation without a certain context in case of relying on machine tools. And in case the documents include marketing content, the translation cannot be done without human supervision due to certain factors. Also, using a translation company with expertise in document translation can help to excel in this regard.

Conclusion

Every type of company and business has to seek document translation for multiple reasons. Opting for machine translation and human expertise for document translation has started to become a trend, and businesses are achieving good results with the hybrid approach. It helps with a good balance of speed and accuracy, better efficiency and scalability, along with risk mitigation and better flexibility. 

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