Translating Paper Books
My translation methodology
8/29/2023
For centuries, communication across cultures has been heavily impeded by language barriers. Translation to cross those barriers required laborious hours of reading phrases and sentences in the source language and then reconceptualizing and rewriting the original idea in the target language. In the 21st century, we translators still do what we've always done, but now we have new tools—Large Language Models and translation software. Almost any type of word processing or text file can be quickly run through translation software which will return a translation which is anywhere from 40% to 60% accurate and is therefore to that extent equivalent to a translation I would do by hand—all within a few seconds. The 40% to 60% of the machine translation which requires further human attention can range from gobbledygook to translations which are 180 degrees opposite of the meaning of the original text! Nevertheless, for many situations, even with the known deficiencies and pitfalls, the machine translation will suffice to get a general idea about the meaning of the source text. Plus in many situations, you can get the machine translation quickly and at zero or little cost. You do not need to hire a professional translator, so cross border communications have been greatly facilitated. One would hope that these technologies will eventually raise mutual understanding among nations to the point that wars become a memory of a distant past.
However, there are still many texts—such as legal documents—which require a human translator who can ensure and certify the accuracy of a translation. And then there are situations in which authors or other interested parties seek a translation which is not only accurate but so good that a reader would not notice that he was reading a translation. Here the goal is to produce a text which goes far beyond the literal, to replace the metaphors and expressions in the source language which make no sense to the target language audience with different but corresponding idioms, metaphors, and expressions in the target language culture. Books are just such documents.
Translating a book is such a big undertaking that the amount of labor involved, and therefore the cost of translation, have made translations of books generally prohibitively expensive. However, a combination of technologies now makes translation of paper books perhaps 60% less expensive in time (and therefore in money as well). So when I was asked to translate the 160-page book above, I offered two alternatives to my client: $1,800 for a full translation that I would personally certify, or $500 for a machine translation which I would clean up and correct but which might contain some significant errors. He chose the latter option. For your information, here is the procedure that I follow in such a situation:
Scan the book with a book scanner. I use the Czur Aura book scanner and OCR software.
Run the Czur OCR software and export the output into a docx file.
Run the docx file through the DeepL Pro document translator system.
The first 3 steps can take about an hour to perform altogether, but step 4 requires many, many hours of reviewing the machine translation and rewriting, reordering, and correcting after review of the original foreign text.
Another slow reading of the entire translation to ensure that the English flows properly, that any remaining strange formulations or unnatural constructions are rewritten, and any final spelling or grammatical problems are corrected.
Another pass through the translation to ensure that the layout corresponds to the original.
In this process I ended up only reading about 50% of the original text (the areas in which the machine translation made no sense or was some form of gobbldygook). Therefore I could only assert a 95% accuracy rating for this type of translation product. However, most clients will balk at more than doubling of the cost in order to assure 100% accuracy. So this method is a viable, reasonable cost option for many situations, and further helps to cross the language/cultural barriers which still exist among us.