When working as a translator at home, you must independently control the quality of translations. This is what allows us to form a circle of regular customers and have a stable flow of orders. Knowing the criteria for good translator work will help with this. Let's look at the most important of them.
How successful the translation will be depends on many factors. The main one is the maximum accuracy of the result in comparison with the original. The resulting text must fully reflect the essence of the original one, and the presentation must be reliable.
The second condition: the translation text must support the tone of the original medium. The translator’s free thoughts and inappropriate attempts at “creativity” on his part are unacceptable. This is especially important in cases where the source and received texts are written in languages from different families.
An incorrectly conveyed message from a text can be misinterpreted by representatives of different cultures. As a result, translation accuracy decreases.
The third point is the transparency of the translation. The translated document should be easy to read and understandable to a native speaker. This is achieved through the translator’s experience and in-depth knowledge of grammar, spelling and stylistics.
It can be especially difficult with idioms and various established phraseological units that are found in one language but not used in another.
To translate such constructions literally means to distort the meaning of the text. However, they should not be omitted either - it is necessary to select similar phrases from the language into which the document is being translated.
The transparency of a translation is easily determined by ear, especially if its subject matter is specific (notable examples are technical, legal, and medical translations). Such a text is replete with “clumsiness” and incomprehensible phrases.
At best, this indicates insufficient training of the translator. At worst - about machine translation with subsequent cursory editing, that is, about deliberate low-quality work.
Finally, the last, but perhaps the most important criterion for a good translation is the specialist’s mastery of the topic, his understanding of the specifics of the concepts and processes reflected in the original. First of all, this concerns technical texts, the essence of which can only be understood by a person with experience in this field.
When done, this problem can sometimes be solved by involving additional specialist(not necessarily a translator) who is well versed in the specific terminology of a certain field of knowledge.
The important thing is that you don’t have to look for such a specialist in your city. For example, it can be found via the Internet in a completely different country. But in this case, the main executor of the order assumes responsibility for the result.
Separately, we note that the correspondence between the volume of the original and translated text is not a criterion for the quality of the translator’s work. This is due to the differences and features between different languages. Thus, a text in Russian translated from English will almost always be longer than the original - and vice versa.
Moreover, in some cases the translator has to deliberately simplify the meaning of the source code or, on the contrary, clarify it. The main thing is that all previously specified criteria are met.
Everyone knows that not every country can boast of its industrial potential. Some states choose agricultural policy as their main focus, others even live off tourism. There are quite a few major players in the mechanical engineering and technical industry market. They can be considered a kind of monopolists. These seriously include the USA, Russia and China. You can often find various machines and technical innovations from the Japanese and French. Naturally, when such products are being prepared for export to other countries, manufacturers most often make sure that all instructions and operating manuals are translated into the languages of the target countries. But sometimes it happens that this information is not enough, or the work of the translators at the initial stage was performed incorrectly. This can cause a number of problems during installation and further operation of the equipment.
The way out of the situation is translation during equipment installation
The most reasonable solution to solve the problem that has arisen is to order a specialist and provide him with linguistic support. This is especially true in cases where equipment costs a lot of money, and improper handling of it can lead to breakdown or even a direct threat to health and life. Translation during installation of equipment, carried out by a qualified employee of the office, will make it possible to comply with all technical recommendations, and will also help to understand the further use of the unit.
Often large companies When purchasing new foreign devices, they order engineers and representatives of the manufacturing company to carry out installation and debugging on site. It also happens that without detailed instructions understand all the intricacies of the action algorithm and additional features It's just not possible. Then the company representatives play the role of instructors, training staff to work with the unit. All this would have been impossible if not for the high-quality linguistic support from a specialist from our bureau.
When choosing a linguist to perform translation during equipment installation, our company is based on the following criteria:
- He has special knowledge in the target direction, thoroughly knows the technical language and terminology relating to specific equipment;
- He is fluent in the language of the manufacturing company and can communicate with it at a native level;
- He will make sure that every word is translated with filigree precision and full compliance with meaning.
By observing the above selection criteria, you can select the optimal contractor who will be able to complete work of any complexity. Linguistic support for the supervision of installation of equipment is a responsible task on which the efficiency and safety of employees depends, therefore our bureau takes this area extremely seriously.
Before investing in production
Decisions on investment in production (increasing the technical base) are one of the most costly and responsible in a company’s work.
Let's try to analyze a typical situation when making decisions on expanding the fleet of production facilities.
Determining the bottleneck in production is quite a complex problem in itself. Quite often, a situation arises when managers of workshops and departments tend to underestimate the actual productivity of equipment in order to attract priority financing. The incentive is obvious - the creation of an additional safety cushion in the form of production capacity in case of the need to “put out a fire” in the form of urgent orders, equipment breakdowns, expansion of the range of products, and so on. Unfortunately, after some time, a request for additional personnel will be received from the same department. To convince top management of the correctness decision taken, this department will devote all its efforts to increasing local productivity (in other words, the equipment will be loaded all available time, regardless of need). Consequently, after several production cycles, an application will be received for attracting additional warehouse space (for storing unfinished products). If intermediate storage is not possible (due to technological features production), it will be necessary to expand the fleet of equipment down the chain to ensure sufficient throughput production. After some time, another cycle begins, searching for the next bottleneck, designed to balance existing gaps (including in capacity) in supply chains.
It is not uncommon for departments with a higher level of process and operations management maturity to be “passed over” (from a funding perspective) in favor of less effective departments (regardless of the reasons for the existence of “inefficiencies”). Thus, a rather paradoxical situation may arise when it is irrational for a manager to increase the efficiency of a particular site, but it is easier to collect the maximum number of negative phenomena (breakdowns, downtime, changeovers, etc.), underestimate the current productivity of equipment, justify a worsening trend in the future... and obtain additional capacity . Moreover, the reason most often lies not in the dishonesty of the line manager, but in the lack of an objective picture. Line personnel tend to interpret the situation in the most negative light, as they are faced with situations of “fighting fires” of breakdowns, downtime, inflated expectations from the planning department, etc. constantly and the desire to find a way out by “breaking the bottleneck” is quite natural. It is also worth noting that it is rarely possible to independently create an adequate tool for monitoring and checking production time losses, so the list of available levers for fundamentally changing the situation is significantly limited. What can be applied in this situation? First of all, don’t rush to build up production capacity. It is possible that to the current problems you will add difficulties with introducing additional capacities, synchronizing production chains, managing an increased number of personnel, increasing the volume of planning work, etc. We recommend reconsidering the approach to monitoring lost production time and using a comprehensive OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) assessment methodology. You can see the approach itself below.
The potential of using the OEE technique...
OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) - approach to assessment, analysis and management life cycle productive forces. The essence of the approach is a comprehensive analysis of metrics characterizing various aspects of equipment operation, including downtime, reduced operating speed and loss of quality.
OEE allows you to identify categories of efficiency losses, and with increasing maturity of the organization, the causes of “inefficiencies” in the management of production facilities. Consistent use of the methodology allows us to identify not only downtime due to breakdowns, but also loss of time (including) due to:
- non-optimal equipment settings;
- decreased work productivity;
- stopping due to waiting for materials to arrive;
- inefficient use of labor resources;
- and so on.
OEE indicators allow you to objectively assess the impact of the current performance of an individual piece of equipment on the efficiency of the entire production and make an informed decision:
- Has the existing potential of the productive forces been exhausted?
- have all wasted production time been eliminated?
- How effectively are we using our staff?
- How efficient are we in terms of operations (planned maintenance, changeovers)?
- should we invest in equipment expansion?
Of course, such decisions require a specialized assessment methodology and methodological approach.
Key Performance Indicators
There are several common methods for calculating the Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) indicator. In this case, what we propose is the simplest and most practical:
OEE = Availability x Performance x Quality Level
The indicator “Equipment Availability” is the time of availability of equipment for production in relation to the planned operating time. The availability indicator is affected by equipment breakdowns; time for readjustment and adjustment; recorded minor stops.
The Performance indicator reflects how close the actual operation of the equipment is to the rated performance. Efficiency is affected by short-term (unrecorded) shutdowns; slowing down the speed of equipment.
The “Quality Level” indicator is determined by the total quantity of products of established quality compared to the total production output.
OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) Calculator
To calculate OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness), we need the following data:
- equipment operating time;
- equipment breakdowns;
- scheduled stops (changeovers, washing, maintenance, scheduled repairs, etc.);
- downtime (stoppages for external reasons: power outage, no QMS, no order for production, etc.);
- rated productivity of equipment (Piece/hour);
- total products produced (Pcs.);
- defective products.
OEE monitoring is the first step towards improving the efficiency of equipment use. However, at the initial stages you should not approach the calculation too academically. Confusion in the terms and methods of recording the required information can cause rejection in the early stages. It is recommended to obtain a general picture of the operation of equipment, work centers, or test the technique in the most problematic (or important) areas of production using a small group.
After receiving the first results, it is necessary to determine anomalous values (both high and low) and form a hypothesis for the occurrence of deviations. On at this stage It is recommended to involve workshop workers. As a rule, the key reasons are known, but due to the underdeveloped registration system they cannot be digitized and presented in the form of financial losses, impact on top-level indicators (level customer service, reserve ratio and others). So, the reasons have been established, the first victories have been achieved, and an understanding of the current situation has been gained. What's the next step? We recommend:
- digitize lost production time;
- calculate the financial effect of losses;
- determine the direction of improvements (increasing capacity availability, increasing quality, increasing productivity, etc.);
- form working group and determine the required resources for the implementation of activities; implement activities and analyze the results obtained;
- expand the scope of tracking lost production time.
FNC employees use up to 17 indicators to evaluate the company’s operating activities, depending on:
- areas of efficiency improvement (operational efficiency, organizational effectiveness, capacity utilization efficiency);
- the scale of decisions made (from investments in production capacity to the formation of regulations on changeovers).
The most important part of training future translators is to develop their skills in the translation process. Such skills can be more general or more specific, covering a number of actions or a single action.
The specificity of the development of translation skills is that they are created only as a result of practical actions of students based on their existing language skills and theoretical knowledge.
Forming skills is a long process. You can set the goal of a separate lesson to develop a particular skill, but you cannot expect that it will be finally formed as a result of this lesson. Often during practical exercises In translating texts of varying difficulty, several skills are simultaneously developed. Not all skills that ensure a successful translation process can be identified and described. Some of them are complex and difficult to analyze.
1. The ability to perform parallel actions in two languages, switch from one language to another. As we have already noted,
such a skill partially arises spontaneously with the development of bilingualism, but it must be brought to professional level. The development of this skill is facilitated by the study of translation compliance and translation techniques, but main path its improvement lies through constant bilingual action, translations of both entire texts and their fragments. The teacher’s speech plays a certain role in this process. Since an important component of this skill is the use of synonymous means of the target language, it is advisable to conduct the lesson in this language. When developing interpreting skills, it is useful to encourage students to mentally translate everything the teacher says. In this case, the teacher can alternately speak in PL and FL.
2. The ability to understand the text in translation. Let us remember that although at the first stage of the translation process the translator acts as a Receptor of the original, his understanding of the text differs somewhat from the usual, primarily in the necessary depth and finality.
The teacher needs to show and constantly remind students that they must simultaneously draw information about the meaning of linguistic units in the text from two sources: the systemic meaning of the unit and the context of its use. Each unit of language has a relatively stable meaning that is common to the entire linguistic community. Speakers are forced to use a unit according to its meaning if they want to be understood correctly. A word can have many meanings, but it cannot mean anything. Thus, the English “board” can mean “commission, board, food” and a number of others, but it can never mean “Universe”, “love” and “running”. In the text, a word can realize one or two of its meanings or acquire some additional semantic connotation due to the context. The English “student” can be used to mean “a student of secondary or higher educational institution", "university student", "student high school", "studying" (I am a student of human nature"), Russian. “student” can implement the masculine seme (Students often study better than male students) or neutralize it (A good student will not come to class unprepared), etc. It often happens that a future translator exaggerates the importance of one of two sources of information: persistently strives to use
the dictionary meaning of the word, without paying attention to the context, or offers an option that is suitable in the context, but does not take into account the meaning of the word at all. In such cases, the teacher points out the error to the student, demonstrating how these two “pillars” should interact, on which the correct understanding of the text is based. For example: “In the past the race has never been a contest.”
3. Carrying out parallel actions in two languages during the translation process involves the development of another skill - the ability to build synonymous structures and synonymous words in the TL and make a choice between them. Thus, the idea that previously the competition was not intense, but now such tension has appeared, can be expressed by such Russian structures as “the struggle in the competition has intensified”, “the competition has become more intense”, “the competition has begun to arouse intense interest”, etc. d. The word “race” can correspond to the Russian words “race, pursuit, race, competition”, etc.
The right choice between various options translation is also associated with the ability to compare the meanings of each correspondence with a specific context. Thus, analyzing the use of the word “race” in the Russian language, it can be noted that it is limited to those sports where any technical means are used. Since the text is about a running race, this option will have to be rejected. The option “chase” (pursuit of a weaker person with the aim of catching up and punishing) and the option “race” and (a stage of competition that has a beginning and an end) do not correspond to the context.
4. Let us remind you once again that a skill that can be described as the ability to “move away without moving away” is of particular importance for a translator. If it is impossible to apply direct correspondence, the translator is forced to deviate from the original, but at the same time he strives to remain as close as possible to the original meaning. This “least loss” strategy is achieved primarily by varying the linguistic form, as well as by using the closest synonyms.
5. Translation competence also includes the ability to select and correctly use translation techniques, which must be previously studied by students. When translating a text, the teacher offers students the use of
when translating the next statement, use one or another technique or ask them a question which technique is appropriate to use in this case. The course program also includes work on specially selected exercises that develop the ability to use creative translation techniques.
6. A significant place in learning to translate is occupied by the development of the ability to overcome difficulties associated with lexical, phraseological, grammatical and stylistic features of the source language. Using data from the particular theory of translation, the teacher offers students exercises where each translation difficulty of this type is presented in sufficient quantity as part of individual statements or in a coherent text (see the section on translation exercises).
7. When translating into their native language, students are expected to have the ability to competently and correctly express their thoughts in the target language. However, often the teacher has to take care of improving this skill with the help of special tasks and constant attention to the quality of the target language and the development of communicative and speech competence. To a much greater extent, such work is necessary when learning to translate from a native language into a foreign language.
8. A translator needs the ability to edit his own and other people’s translations, detect and eliminate semantic and stylistic errors, criticize and evaluate proposed options with evidence. During educational process The teacher constantly invites students to give their options, express opinions on the translations of their comrades, and justify their comments and suggestions. It is also advisable to give students special tasks on editing translations containing typical translation errors and errors.
9. Successful implementation of the translation process requires the ability to professionally use dictionaries, reference books, data banks and other sources additional information, as well as the ability to use in work typewriter, voice recorder or computer.
10. All of the above skills come together in the ability to analyze the original text, identify standard and non-standard
specific translation problems and choose ways to solve them that are most appropriate for each specific act of translation. This skill is developed only through practical work under the guidance of a teacher to translate texts of varying degrees of difficulty. This work is carried out both in the process of developing private skills and at the final stage of training.
A professional translator must not only have the necessary skills to carry out the translation process, but also be able to apply these skills in real conditions of translation activity. Therefore, during translation training, work is carried out to develop translation skills, that is, to make the translator’s actions automatic or semi-automatic. This is achieved both by constant exercises in the use of translation skills, and by regular assignments on practical implementation transfers of a certain volume within a specified period of time.
Kontsevoy Daniil Sergeevich,
Private educational institution of higher education "Omsk Law Academy", Omsk
A translator in the field of professional communications is a person who actively speaks foreign language professional sphere, able to logically correctly, reasonedly and clearly construct foreign language oral and written speech, and most importantly, master the technique of using machine translation systems, because even professionals cannot do without turning to electronic translators.
Machine translation - a process performed on a computer or other electronic device to convert text from one language into equivalent text in another language, as well as the result of such an action. Since there are no fully automated electronic translators capable of accurately and correctly translating a text, a specialist translator must prepare this text, or correct errors and omissions already in the machine-processed text.
There are four forms of organizing interaction between a computer and a person when performing machine translation:
- pre-editing: a person prepares the text for computer processing (simplifying the meaning of the text, eliminating ambiguous readings, marking up the text), after which machine translation is performed;
- inter-editing: a person directly intervenes in the operation of the translation system, resolving problematic issues;
- post-editing: the entire source text is subjected to machine processing, and a person corrects the result by editing the translated text;
- mixed system.
Modern electronic translators are capable of producing a perceptually adequate translation of individual phrases and sentences; they serve to facilitate the work of a human translator, to relieve him of the routine work of searching for the meanings of certain words and phrases in dictionaries.
To master machine translation systems, you need to have at least a general understanding of the technology electronic transfer. There are several of them in machine translation:
1) Direct machine translation
Direct machine translation is the oldest machine translation approach. With this method of translation, the text in the source language is not subject to structural analysis beyond morphology. This translation uses large number dictionaries and is word-by-word, except for minor grammatical adjustments, for example regarding word order and morphology. The direct translation system is designed for specific language pairs. The lexicon is a repository of information about the specifics of words. These systems depend on the quality of dictionary preparation, morphological analysis and text processing software. An example of a direct translation system is Systran.
2) Rule-based machine translation uses a large store of linguistic rules and bilingual dictionaries for each language pair. Types of rule-based machine translation include the Interlingua principle and Transfer machine translation.
- Machine translation Interlingua
In machine translation based on the Interlingua principle, translation is carried out through an intermediate (semantic) model of the source language text. Interlingua is a language-independent model from which translations into any language can be generated. The Interlingua principle allows for the possibility of transforming text in the source language into a model common to several languages.
- Transfer machine translation is based on the idea of Interlingua using benchmarking two languages. The three stages of this process are analysis, transfer and generation. First, the source language text is translated into an abstract or intermediate model of the source language, which is then transformed into a target language model, before finally becoming a target language text. This principle is simpler than Interlingua, but it is more difficult to avoid ambiguity.
3) Machine translation on text corpora
The corpus approach in machine translation uses a collection (corpus) of parallel bilingual texts. The main advantage of corpus-based machine translation systems is their self-tuning, i.e. they are able to remember the terminology and even the style of phrases from the texts of previous translations. Statistical machine translation and example-based machine translation are variants of the corpus approach.
- Statistical machine translation
This is a type of machine text translation based on comparison of large volumes of language pairs. This translation approach uses statistical translation models. One of the approaches used is Bayes' theorem. Building statistical translation models is a fairly fast process, but the technology relies heavily on the availability of a multilingual text corpus. A minimum of 2 million words is required for each individual area if we are talking about the language as a whole. Statistical machine translation requires special equipment in order to “average” translation models. An example of statistical machine translation is Google Translate.
- Machine translation with examples
Example-based machine translation systems are based on the principle of a parallel bilingual corpus of texts, which contains pairs of sentences as examples. Each sentence is duplicated in a different language. Statistical machine translation has a "learning" property. The more texts (examples) you have at your disposal, the better the machine translation result.
Every translator in the field of professional communication will face the problem of choosing the appropriate translation program. Excluding paid services, we consider it necessary to analyze the most well-known systems.
The electronic translator Google Translate, which was developed by by Google in the mid-2000s. This service designed for translating texts and translating websites on the fly. The translator uses a self-learning machine translation algorithm based on language analysis of texts.
Unlike most machine translators, which use SYSTRAN technology, Google uses its own software. Google Translate on at the moment is the most popular translator due to its simplicity and versatility (as well as direct connection with the computer software developer - Microsoft). Thanks to this, this machine translation system is developing very quickly and is optimized to meet the needs of users. Therefore, now from the functions this translator you can see: translation of the entire web page; simultaneous search for information with translation into another language; translation of text on images; translation of the spoken phrase; handwriting translation; translation of dialogue.
The features of this machine translation system include:
- Translation options are controlled by a statistical algorithm.
Users can always suggest own options translation of certain words and/or choose one of the translation options as the most suitable. The disadvantage of such an algorithm can be deliberately incorrect translation options, including obscene words.
- Coverage of world languages.
That is, the program now works with more than a hundred languages, including Swahili, Chinese and Welsh. Thus, Google Translator is able to translate from one supported language to another supported language, but in most cases the translation is performed through English. The disadvantage of this mechanism is obvious - the quality of the translation suffers.
On Russian market Among machine translators, the leading position is occupied by PROMT, developed in 1991.
PROMT, like Google Translate, uses its own software, which was significantly updated in 2010. From now on, PROMT carries out translation based on hybrid technology. Its essence lies in the fact that instead of one translation option, the program produces about a hundred translations of the same sentence, depending on the polysemy of words, constructions and statistical results. The machine then selects the most likely of the proposed translations. Thus, the translator is able to learn quickly, but has the same disadvantages as all translators based on statistical methods text processing.
The translator's capabilities include: translation of words, phrases and texts, including using hot keys; translation of a selected area of the screen with graphic text; translation of documents of various formats: doc(x), xls(x), ppt(x), rtf, html, xml, txt, ttx, pdf (including scanned ones), jpeg, png, tiff; use, editing and creation specialized dictionaries and translation profiles; connection of Translation Memory databases and glossaries; integration into office applications, web browsers, corporate portals and websites.
The disadvantages of the translator are: a small number of language pairs with which the program works; complex interface; inaccuracies in the translations of professional vocabulary (which, however, is eliminated by connecting thematic dictionaries).
However, PROMT was recognized as the best English-Russian translator at the annual workshop on statistical machine translation under the auspices of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) in 2013 and 2014.
There are many other machine translation systems, but they, one way or another, copy various features of the domestic PROMT translator or the American Google Translate.
Thus, a translator in the field of professional communication, knowing machine translation technologies, who knows how to choose the right electronic translator for certain purposes, will be savvy to implement successful professional activities, because at this stage of development computer technology It’s too early to think about fully automatic machine translation. A human translator thinks in images and proceeds from the goal: to convey a specific thought to the listener/reader. It's hard to imagine computer program with such possibilities. Modern machine translators play a supporting role. They are designed to save a person from routine work during the translation process. The age of paper dictionaries is over, and machine translation systems are coming to help professional translators (and not only others).
List of used literature
- www.promt.ru
- www.translate.google.com
- Belonogov G.G. Zelenkov Yu.G. Interactive system for Russian-English and English-Russian machine translation, VINITI, 1993.
- Bulletin of Moscow University. Ser.19 Linguistics and intercultural communication. 2004. No. 4, p. 51.
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