Proposal for re-wording warning regarding automatic tools

Hello,

First let me make my bias clear, I'm a developer of open-source machine translation systems. I'm quite glad to have found this site, and it seems a very interesting project.

I'd like to suggest changing the wording of the warning regarding the use of automatic translation tools. Currently it states:

Don't use automatic translation tools. Users copying and pasting from automatic translation tools (very easy to detect), will be definitely banished from the site.

I would like to see this re-worded to something along the lines of:

Use automatic translation tools responsibly. Do not use automatic translation tools as a substitute for knowledge of the language. For more details see our _policy_.

The policy would outline something like the following:

* Automatic translation tools include machine translation and translation memory.
* Do not post output of automatic translation tools without proof-reading by a competent speaker.
* Make it clear in the comment field which tools you have used to perform the translation.

I understand and am completely in agreement with the concern that people would have just come along and copy/paste SYSTRAN or Google translate output willy-nilly. But I think that machine translation can be used responsibly, and encouraging responsible use rather than a zero-tolerance approach would be more productive in the long term. In any case a bad translation is a bad translation, regardless of whether software was involved or not.

I for one am quite willing to state that I use automatic translation tools, including but not limited to machine translation, translation memory, aligned corpora, Google searches etc. And it would be nice if I weren't threatened with banning because of it.

If I am to be banned however, so be it.

Regards,

Fran

Hello ftyers, welcome to cucumis.org.

There's one thing we do not want people to do here, it is using automatic translation tools to translate into any target-language they do not know, we would like translations to be done by people who at least master the target-language, and/or are native speakers from this target-language.

I'm using sometimes automatic tools myself, as an admin, in order to understand some posts from users who do not express themselves in a language I can read, as they may have some requests or notification that make sense, and I think these tools are very useful to me in my admin's job.

But unfortunately we had some people here who pretend to master languages they don't even know to read, and who used translation tools in order to translate texts; the result of it was that they spammed the translation area, didn't even answer our PM telling them they shouldn't translate a text from a language they do not read, and didn't care at all about the warnings we sent them. These people, and only these people, were banned from the site for this matter.

SO now you can see we do not use "banning-machines", and as far as a translation machine user is not notified by an expert from the target-language, these tools still will be used by anybody who wants to.

But telling users they should use translation tools responsibly would be kind of irresponsible from us, as our policy relies on the human translation, moreover quality from the translations we provide is due at least at 90% to the fact translations were done by native speakers from the target-language, who master all the idiomatic expressions that are not obviously assimilated by people who can read the target-language, but do not master its idiomatic expressions at 100%.

Most of the time when an expression isn't rendered at its best there's someone to notify it in the discussion area, as well as there's often somebody to notify some translation was done using automatic translation tools.

But we do not ban people who are doing a real job with all kind of "search tools" and spend volunteerly some of their time to let the translation job from this site be improved, it would be unfair as any good willing person here is welcome, as far as her/his purpose is to help improving quality of the translations.

Yes, I understand your concern perfectly and I realise that the first part I suggested isn't as unambiguous as I'd hoped. The same problem happens on Wikipedia as well, and sadly in some free software localisation. It gives a bad name to the translation software, and also to the site or software using the translation. So, a change of:

"Use automatic translation tools responsibly."

to

"Do not use automatic translation tools irresponsibly."

Would be better. As you pointed out, the

Yes, I realised that you don't use banning-machines, attempting to discern between bad human translation and bad automatic translation can be done, see for example Somers et al. (2006), but isn't something that could be set up easily in a site such as this.

Fran

References

* Somers, H., Gaspari, F. and Niño, A. (2006) Detecting Inappropriate Use of Free Online Machine Translation by Language Students: A Special Case of Plagiarism Detection. 11th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation - Proceedings (Oslo, Norway), 41-48.

Hi ftyers, I agree with you that automatic translation softwares can be useful, but as told Francky, experimented translators knows how to use it.
But for new members, we need rules as clear as possible, "Don't use automatic tools". Experimented members knows they can use automatic tools responsibly.

Ok, so I guess I can just point here to people. I'm assuming you mean "experienced" rather than "experimented", but:

"Experienced members know they can use automatic tools responsibly"

Fran

Yep experienced

If you can use the automatic translation tools expertly, then nobody will be able to tell, and thus you won't get banned. Problem solved.

The problem is that we want high-quality translations, not something taken off a Google translator. If it's a high-quality computer-assisted translation, then we're good.

> If you can use the automatic translation tools expertly, then nobody will be able to tell, and thus you won't get banned. Problem solved.

Quite true, I've used automatic translation and haven't been banned yet

My point was more why threaten people with each and every translation they do if they're using the tools responsibly?