The Voice of a Translation: What Humans Bring to the Communicative Process

With every quarter in the year, translation news seems to be filled with the advancement of machine translation, the dawn of the perfected translator in real-time. For years, the debate has hinged upon the accuracy of translation, how close machine translation can be to a text-to-text, word-for-word translation. While headlines proclaim that this capability has been reached, an important aspect of translation little focused on still lies beyond machine translation alone. Where human translators have and will show their most vital contribution is the voice of a translation—the element of the meaning of words instead of only the words themselves.

The voice of a translation refers to its meaning, the message that is being conveyed in consideration of its context and audience. Countless words can craft a similar meaning to each other, but they are never exact, each word or sequence of words creating a subtly different interpretation of the message. Differing audiences also change the interpretation of a message; what one audience perceives can drastically differ from another’s, even while reading the same text. Regarding translation, clients aware of these nuances of language and people can approach their translators with these concerns. While relying on a machine translation would produce a text often unaware of context or audience, human translators are able to listen to a client’s intended message and the text’s intended audience, crafting their translation to address both issues. Humans are most apt to reach, persuade, inform, and influence other humans in other aspects of life; why should we consider translation to differ?