Tulevaisuuden kääntäjän kuva

Asiatekstikääntämisen tulevaisuudennäkymiä asiantuntijoiden silmin

Authors

• Annamari Korhonen Tampereen yliopisto

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.61200/mikael.129200

Keywords:

specialized translation, digital translation environments, machine translation, translation industry trends

Abstract

Commercial specialized translation is a rapidly evolving industry most prominently characterised by pressure towards lower prices and the implementation of new technological tools. Based on interviews of translation professionals, I describe how they expect the industry to develop: which positive and negative trends they recognize, which competence profiles translators will need, and how the implementation of machine translation tools and features will change their work. It is evident that while translation professionals are worried about the negative price development and have somewhat mixed feelings about machine translation, they believe that human translators will continue to be needed for the foreseeable future. Anticipated changes in competence profiles include increased specialization, the ability to work fast, and the ability to adopt new tools. The interviewees also expect that translators may be motivated to specialize either in post-editing of machine-translated texts, or in highly creative translations. They are well aware of the benefits and risks of machine translation; while recognizing the considerable improvement in machine translation technology, they do not believe that the typical quality problems of neural machine translation can be fully resolved.