AI, machine translation and post-editing
With nearly 30 years of experience in the industry, Caupenne & Co. has successfully anticipated and negotiated the technological shift essential for a long-term future in the translation sector. The languages market has not been spared by technological developments and AI. It has even contributed to the digital revolution by offering increasingly innovative solutions to meet the needs of buyers. Caupenne & Co. has successfully adapted its strategy and its processes to make full use of AI in its working methods and engineering. Let’s take a look at the solutions that currently exist on the market: neural machine translation and post-editing.
What is neural machine translation (NMT)?
NMT is an automatic translation process involving a translation engine that operates on a similar basis to a neural network. Thanks to artificial intelligence, the engine no longer thinks in terms of words or phrases, but a block of text to be translated, giving access to the whole context of the document. The results can be remarkable in terms of fluency, quality and terminology. This needs to be qualified, however, because raw machine translation always requires human intervention to check, correct and reword the raw text. This process is what we call post-editing.
Definition of post-editing
Post-editing involves reviewing the raw text generated by a neural machine translation engine to ensure it is as close to a human translation as possible. The linguist’s task is to complete, modify, correct, review and proofread the raw text according to the quality criteria defined in advance by the project managers and their clients.
Post-editing is used to achieve a specific goal: optimizing costs and deadlines. In terms of deadlines, post-editing can increase productivity by around 30% on average. With regard to costs, the results depend on the quality of the source document and how technical the text is. Feel free to contact us for a quote.
What is the difference between post-editing and raw machine translation?
It is possible to use neural machine translation with no human intervention, but this should only happen under very specific circumstances: internal working documents, documents not for publication, documents where only the gist is needed. Thanks to our cybersecurity system, Caupenne & Co. guarantees total security for your data: with us, your data will be neither conserved nor reused, unlike online translation systems such as Google Translate or DeepL. We are also protected against cyberattacks and have an RDS system and a business continuity plan to ensure that no data is ever lost or leaked.
Raw machine translation (with no review by a professional) should not be confused with post-editing. The quality of a raw machine translation can appear to be very good, but the text may still include misinterpretations. This makes it essential for a professional linguist to check through the document and give it the necessary level of quality.
To optimize the raw translation results still further, our engines are trained automatically following each project. This improves the results over the long term and increases the productivity benefits still further.
Which projects and contexts are suited to machine translation?
We recommend only using machine translation in the following cases:
- You need to understand a call for bids or a technical document quickly
- You want the outlines of a financial report or contract immediately
- The document is intended for internal use only
- The document will not be published
- You do not need the style of the document to be particularly polished
- The deadline is very tight for the volume of work required
- The document is not of critical importance
Who carries out the post-editing work?
Professional post-editors, trained and specialized in the relevant field. We give our suppliers the benefit of our expertise by sending them our recommendations and instructions together with your glossaries and reference documents, while guaranteeing total confidentiality for your information and documents.
Solutions to take things further
AI is truly disrupting the translation and interpreting market. As well as machine translation and post-editing, Caupenne & Co., the translation company in Lyon and Paris, can also offer remote interpreting services so that your meetings, annual general meetings and conferences can go ahead regardless of the circumstances. We also provide transcription, voice recognition, subtitling, dubbing, and website content management automation services, as well as many others. All these services are affected by AI, and we work every day with our R&D department to integrate these technologies into our processes and meet your needs.
Caupenne & Co., your expert in language and technology solutions.
