Since the advent of technology, many tools have been created to make our lives more convenient, whether for education, business, or everyday use. Machine translation (MT) gained its popularity in recent years due to its accessibility and affordability, but some argue that MT is nowhere as accurate and efficient as humans so that there is no need to fear machinery taking over the translation industry in the soon future.
The translation industry has been well established since the rise of civilization and it will remain the same until the dawn of humanity. The fundamental purpose of translation is to express meanings from one language to another, and sometimes there might be implicit meanings that could not be detected by insensitive machines, or there might be a pun or two that only sentential beings would understand. In Hai-yin Lin’s ‘The Old Stories of Peking’, there are many expressions that could only be understood by locals, and all of those perks have gone missing in the translated text. If all the translation work was dealt by machinery, all these beautiful meanings would be lost in the process of translation, and none would allow this to happen.
Undoubtedly, MT is very handy and many youngsters use it as their first learning tool when approaching a foreign language. It sure can translate texts quite literally and provide a general idea of the meaning of the text, but it can do nothing beyond that. Growing up in an era where technology is prevalent, I found myself using MT quite often, and as a bilingual person, the flaws and sparks are immediately conspicuous. Sometimes I forget the word that I intended to use, so I use MT to translate the word from another language. Though it does get the job done, there are certainly better words that represent the idea better, yet MT does not have the ability to pick the best word from its lexical set. MT could be a useful tool when there is no other support around, but it could never replace humans because it lacks the process of interpretation and appreciation.