{"id":3584,"date":"2021-02-25T22:14:50","date_gmt":"2021-02-25T22:14:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/FLD\/?p=3584"},"modified":"2026-04-12T04:15:37","modified_gmt":"2026-04-12T04:15:37","slug":"beat-the-machine-6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/FLD\/2021\/02\/25\/beat-the-machine-6\/","title":{"rendered":"Beat the Machine: Putting Technical Translation Under the Microscope (Sort Of)"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Photo Credit: Unsplash<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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\"\"By Sam Mowry<\/em><\/p>\n

Welcome to the February follow-up of our Beat the Machine challenge! In our January post<\/a>, I suggested a sentence to be translated and asked FLD members to submit their own versions, presumably improving upon the machine translated option. Now it\u2019s time to go over some of their particularly interesting solutions.<\/p>\n

As a refresher, this is what we were working with:<\/p>\n

La gestion des r\u00e9sultats hors sp\u00e9cification a \u00e9t\u00e9 revue au travers du dossier suivant\u00a0: n\u00b0\u00a0XYXY relatif \u00e0 la fiche n\u00b0\u00a0123 de mal\u00e9ate de trim\u00e9butine dont le point de fusion a \u00e9t\u00e9 mesur\u00e9 non conforme\u00a0; l\u2019hypoth\u00e8se d\u2019un capillaire trop rempli pour l\u2019analyse a \u00e9t\u00e9 confirm\u00e9e par les s\u00e9ries de mesure n\u00b0\u00a02 et n\u00b0\u00a03 qui ont donn\u00e9 des r\u00e9sultats conformes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And here\u2019s what Google Translate gave us:<\/p>\n

The management of non-specification results was reviewed through the following file: No. XYXY relating to sheet No. 123 of trimebutine maleate whose melting point was measured as non-compliant; the hypothesis of a capillary too full for analysis was confirmed by series of measurements n \u00b0 2 and n \u00b0 3 which gave consistent results.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Isn\u2019t that fun? No points awarded for guessing this month\u2019s theme, which is clearly SUPER DUPER technical. If it weren\u2019t patently obvious (see what I did there?), this sentence was supplied by our beloved FLD colleague and technical translator extraordinaire, Karen Tkacyzk. Thanks, Karen, for this fascinating glimpse into technical translation. While this sentence struck fear into many hearts this month, mine among them, it\u2019s an excellent opportunity to reflect and appreciate how varied the world of translation is. Even within a single language pair (French into English), the range of materials to be translated runs the gamut from literary fiction to texts like this one and literally<\/em> everything in between. From a marketing perspective, it\u2019s a good reminder that it\u2019s almost impossible to specialize too narrowly, because this kind of extremely specific<\/em> text exists in the world and needs to be translated. From a competition perspective, it\u2019s a delight to remember that the vast majority of FR>EN translators are your colleagues, not your competition. I\u2019m just one example, but this text is so far from the kind of texts I work with, and more importantly, it\u2019s even farther from the kinds of texts I have any desire at all to work with. There are more than enough topics for everyone\u2014and on the rare chance that there are many translators specializing in your language, direction, and<\/em> specific subject: what a gift! A community you can reach out to when you get stuck on a term!<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>Karen, blessedly, provided two translations, in her words, \u201cthe first one fairly faithful and the second more me writing what they mean\u201d:<\/p>\n

Translation 1:<\/p>\n

The management of out-of-specification results was reviewed through file No.\u00a0XYXY regarding form No.\u00a0123 for trimebutine maleate, where the melting point was measured as nonconforming. The hypothesis given of testing having been done with a capillary that was too full was confirmed by second and third measurement series, which gave conforming results.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Translation 2:<\/p>\n

The management of out-of-specification results was reviewed through file No.\u00a0XYXY regarding Certificate of Analysis No.\u00a0123 for trimebutine maleate, where the melting point measurement did not comply. The hypothesis given, that this was caused by testing with a capillary that was too full, was confirmed by two more series of measurements, where the results complied.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>To translate this yet again into what the sentence actually means (for laypeople like myself): there was a result that didn\u2019t fall in line with the numbers it was supposed to. It was used as a case study for how that kind of result is handled. In this case, specifically form\u00a0123 in file no.\u00a0XYXY, the melting point of a specific chemical seemed wrong. The people testing hypothesized that there was too much of said chemical in the tube to get an accurate result, which they verified by doing it two more times. Then the results were good.<\/p>\n

Due to the nature of this sentence, evaluating the submissions we received is more a case of pass\/fail, \u201cIs this correct?\u201d than critiquing fun turns of phrase. If you submitted a translation for this sentence, thank you! I really appreciate it, and you did a great job. All the submissions we received were reasonably accurate. I wanted to highlight one that read as particularly smooth to me, as someone without a technical background:<\/p>\n

Out-of-specification result management was reviewed using File No.\u00a0XYXY relating to Sheet No.\u00a0123 for trimebutine maleate, whose melting point was found to be non-compliant. Test series No. 2 and No. 3 yielded compliant results, which confirmed the hypothesis that a capillary tube had been overfilled during testing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I asked Karen for her professional opinion, and she noted that, \u201cWhoever submitted it knows what\u2019s going on and is a decent technical translator.\u201d Congratulations, anonymous submitter! Karen said that the only thing she\u2019d change is that \u201cduring testing\u201d at the end of the sentence is ambiguous, but in the source, it does mean the first series. She suggested \u201c\u2026during initial testing,\u201d or \u201c\u2026during the first series.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thanks again for all of your submissions! Stay tuned for next month, which I promise will be very different indeed!<\/p>\n

Did you forget to submit a translation in time? Not to worry! Share your version on Twitter and tag the French Language Division (@ATA_FLD<\/a>) and me,\u00a0@SamTranslates<\/a>.<\/p>\n

If you would like to submit a sentence for a future slam, I would like that very much! You can contact me, Sam Mowry, directly at sam [at] frenchtranslation.expert or on Twitter at the handle listed above. You can also contact the\u00a0\u00c0 Propos<\/em>\u00a0Editor Ben Karl at ben [at] bktranslation.com.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019d like to help launch a similar slam but into French, please also reach out!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    By Sam Mowry Welcome to the February follow-up of our Beat the Machine challenge! In our January post, I suggested a sentence to be translated and asked FLD members to submit their own versions, presumably improving upon the machine translated option. Now it\u2019s time to go over some of their particularly interesting solutions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-beat-the-machine"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/FLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/FLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/FLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/FLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/FLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3584"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/FLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3584\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4852,"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/FLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3584\/revisions\/4852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/FLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/FLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/FLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}