The future of translation is part human, part machine

Greece and Rome were, like many areas of the ancient world, multilingual, and so needed both translators and interpreters. My own thesis into English to Welsh translation – due to be published later this year – shows that a translator working to correct the output from machine translation makes for higher productivity and quicker translation. Well over 350,000 people speak Welsh every day, while local authorities across the UK are also translating into numerous other languages. Today, machine translation can create rough drafts of relatively simple language, and research shows that correcting this draft is usually more efficient than translation from scratch by a human.