Translation became an integral part of every culture and it wasn’t long before every culture had their own Translation Centre.

The Ever-Growing Importance of Translation

As time passed, translation became vitally important to the relationships between different nations, basically because the process of communication couldn’t function effectively without it. Translation became an integral part of every culture and it wasn’t long before every culture had their own Translation Centre. There was a translation school in Spain, and Baghdad had The House of Wisdom, plus of course there were many monasteries where monks worked long hours on transcriptions and translations. Translation was an elite pursuit right back as far as ancient Rome and it became part of the resume of every educated man’s talents. Then, with the advancement of translation, the industry became a science – an independent skill, and one that would prove of great service to the world forever.

The Translation Industry Today

Today, translation is just as important (maybe even more so) than it was all those years ago - or perhaps that’s just a matter of opinion! We understand that there are approximately 6800 languages spoken worldwide, and a large portion of these have unique scripts, with many languages having shared scripts. Of course, what compounds these challenges is the fact that almost every culture in the modern world is interacting with other cultures, which means that there’s an incalculable amount of translations required every single day. So it’s easy to see that translation has become a vitally important aspect of the interaction between cultures. Of course translating manually has always been a rather slow process, and this has led to the introduction of translation technology, and so today we have machine translations and machine aided human translations.

Translation Technology

Because we’re living in such a technologically-savvy world, it was only a matter of time before translation software would be introduced to the process of document translation. Obviously, translation software is more fallible than human translation, but machine translations have become useful for several applications. Today we have machine translations being used for weather reports, and other areas with limited linguistic variables. It’s also used for some written government and legal communications, although often with some human intervention. Although today we see machine translations having a limited application, they’re still a very useful tool for professional translators, and they certainly make the translation job quicker and easier. Claude Piron was a professional translator who, during his lifetime, worked with the United Nations and the World Health Organization: he stated that machine translation automates the easier parts of a translator’s efforts.

A machine translation in its most advanced form can certainly provide an acceptable output for unrestricted texts; however, at least for the time being, we don’t believe that machine translations will ever take over the need for human translators. Even the highest quality machine translation software can only produce mediocre results when specialized or sensitive translation is required. There’s no adequate substitute for an experienced, certified human translator, particularly when a translation client requires the highest quality results and integrity with respect to both the source and target material.