Are machine translations a threat to foreign language translation professionals?

My friends and I used to laugh so hard at the ridiculous translations generated by Babelfish.





However, this morning, I ran some Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper articles through Google Translations and was genuinely shocked at how much better machine translation has become over the past ten years! The translations are often so accurate, a human is only required to proofread the output!





Is this going to result in vastly fewer jobs for translators? And will it make the translator's job considerably more tedious? It sounds to me that the thrill of translating will be cut out, leaving only tedious "what the heck does this word mean" obscure expression-finding...





Is this an accurate view of what is going to happen to traditional, manual translations?|||From completing an internship at Veritas Language Solutions in Swansea - a translation and interpreting company I would argue that human translators are still the only way to get large chunks of language translated accurately.





While online translators have improved over the years , I've found them to still make very basic errors as well as major errors which could go unnoticed. I think translators jobs are definitely safe for the forseeable future as they are still much more accurate and are more likely to use sophisticated language and colloquial terms essential for good translations.|||Machine translators can only ever go so far. Inputting something such as a newspaper article into a translator would heed much better results because it is written formally, simply, and as grammatically correct as possible. But the majority of works outside of newspaper articles are not, and will contain slang and unique spoken varieties that machine translators cannot understand and who will always be "behind the times" on.





Not only that, but machine translations will always lack the most important thing that comes with translation: the ability to understand subtle nuances. Machine translators are built to try their very best at literally translating something, and when they cannot tackle it to skip it. Machines cannot comprehend the metaphoric meanings of the original author, nor can they offer proper equivalents of any idioms to the other language.





Humans will always have the upper hand where language is concerned because you cannot program into a machine the things necessary to be able to understand what is implied, but not spoken outright.|||At this stage human translators are still more then welcomed. But, in the future, as you say, machines might take over (still with the assistance of humans).


Still, as far as translating books (high quality literature, poetry, plays, etc) and all translations where there is a need for a broader culture and knowledge (a requirement a good translator must have) machines won't be able to take over. So,I guess, only the best will survive!|||The thrill of translating will only grow. All the routine technical work will be minimized with the help of machine translation. But the real translation work - the art part rather than the craft one will always be handled by talented human translators