Plain language makes machine translation more accurate – it’s a case of ‘simple is smart’.
This fortunate combination can be summarised in a syllogism: the simpler the source text, the more accurate the machine translation.
The main goal of clear language is to make texts simple. Texts written in clear Language, when submitted to machine translation, generate highly accurate translations.
Let me develop this idea a little further.
What characterizes a text written, or rewritten, in plain language?
Therefore, by their very nature, they eliminate all the difficulties that machine translation typically struggles to overcome. All the stumbling blocks for machine translation, whether based on statistical models or even artificial neural networks, are no longer present. As a result, translation time decreases and quality increases.
The future of machine translation now seems set, and market trends confirm this: more and more companies rely on it to reduce costs for producing multilingual content and to obtain materials in very short timeframes. In some cases, they rely on a human translator for review (post-editing) to reduce the risk of poor translation. But is there another way, besides a human translator, to reduce this risk?
An effective strategy to reduce the risk of non-optimal output, even in the absence of final human review, is to pay special attention to input texts. The economic advantage is straightforward: while the cost of post-editing must be multiplied by the number of target languages, the intervention on the input texts for machine translation is performed only once. Incidentally, the source-language texts also benefit and become more readable, but in terms of translation costs, this is only a side effect. For target languages, instead, there is a true multiplicative effect.
About Michela Zanon
Michela Zanon is a Technical Communicator and Trainer at Writec. She is a senior technical communicator specialising in terminology, minimalist writing techniques, plain language, and technical documentation in Italian and English. Her work covers sectors including biotechnology, automotive, mechanical engineering, industry and software. She has worked in technical writing and communication since 1996, and is involved in promoting and implementing International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 24495 on plain language.
See Michela Zanon’s LinkedIn profile or visit the Writec website.
