Translators' Future

Records of translation in China can be traced back to the Zhou Dynasty, more than 3,000 years ago, but it was not until the Ming Dynasty that the official government set up an institution to train translators. In ancient China, due to the concept of "the translator is inferior to the author", the important position of translators in cultural exchanges has not been emphasized enough. However, since the reform and opening up, with the increase of China's foreign communication needs, translation activities have made great contributions in politics, economy, science and technology, culture, military and other aspects, and the status of translators has been improved. In recent years, the wave of artificial intelligence has gradually taken the world by storm, and the frequent appearance of intelligent simultaneous interpreters in major conferences can't help but cause translators to panic, and "whether machine translation can replace human translation" has become a hot topic in the translation industry.
1. Pre-translation editing and post-translation proofreading
There are many differences between different languages in terms of grammar, structure and expression, and machine translation is not yet able to achieve zero-error conversion. For example, the Chinese language emphasizes the meaning, often omitting the subject, and sometimes the expression of the logical relationship between sentences is more obscure, while the English language emphasizes the form, and the sentence structure is usually more complete. Since machine translation cannot analyze sentence meaning and context, when translating from Chinese to English, the translator needs to judge the sentence meaning according to the context and supplement the subject and logical conjunctions appropriately before translation in order to assist machine translation. In addition, based on the similarities and differences between the source and target languages, pre-translation editing can also include adjusting word order, simplifying sentence structure, eliminating ambiguities and so on. On the other hand, existing machine translation is unable to understand culture, context, rhetoric and style, so if cultural phenomena in the original language are directly translated, the translation may not be able to realize the effect of the original text, and may even result in a misunderstanding. In order to avoid affecting the reading experience of readers, translators can undertake the work of proofreading and touching up the machine translation, add comments to the cultural phenomena that are difficult to be understood by the target readers, or look for equivalent cultural phenomena in the target language to replace them.
2. Creation of translations
Creation translation as an iconic product of human imagination is hard to be replaced by machine translation and is an excellent piece of high ground. "Creation translation is a transcription method of editing, reorganization, creative rewriting, creative reconstruction, etc. of the source text in the target language system to realize the expressive and purposeful text of the target discourse." Creative translation applies to the translation of tourism public announcements, terminology, poetry, advertisements, etc. It is necessary to realize the accuracy of information transmission as well as to meet the needs of cross-cultural communication. Translation methods such as "faithful rebellion" and "provincial translation" are means of translation creation, which can only be better realized by human translators. Creative translation is undoubtedly the best choice for good translators.
3. Product content management
The openness and integration of the global economy has become a major trend at present, and the total amount of China's foreign trade and import and export in 2018 amounted to as much as 30.51 trillion yuan, an increase of 9.7% year-on-year, hitting another record high. Due to cultural differences, the internationalization of products is not only limited to translating relevant information into the target language, but also needs to add new cultural factors appropriately according to the target market to cater to the target users. During years of foreign language learning, translators have gained the ability to quickly master a country's culture and understand the basic principles of cross-cultural communication, so they can provide suggestions for product internationalization based on the history and customs of the target culture, etc. For example, although cell phone photo functions such as face slimming and whitening are very popular in the Chinese market, Europeans and Americans don't have much demand for these beauty functions, and domestic cell phone manufacturers should enter the European and American markets with consider this factor. Meanwhile, due to the existence of cultural differences, the promotional softwares of different products in different countries are also different, and the translator can be engaged in the content management of advertising softwares. The slogan of Toyota in the Chinese market is "When there is a car, there will be a car, and when there is a road, there will be a Toyota car". In the U.S. market, the slogan is " Not all cars are created equal", which is borrowed from the U.S. Declaration of Independence, " All men are created equal", and it is easier to resonate with U.S. consumers.
4. Assisting in the development of AI translation
The research and development of computer-aided translation and machine translation tools requires technicians to carry out algorithm design and data processing work on the one hand, and linguistic talents are also indispensable for lexical, syntactic and other linguistic analysis work on the other. Corpus is a powerful support for the research and development of AI translation tools, which stores a large number of language materials in real-life scenarios, which must be processed and organized through the system of word segmentation, lexical annotation, syntactic analysis, etc., so as to facilitate language workers to extract the linguistic laws from them, and to provide the linguistic hierarchy for the research of AI machine translation. In addition, by understanding the principle and role of translation memory and terminology database, translators actually operate computer-aided translation and machine translation tools, compare their user experience with the previous manual translation experience, discover the advantages and disadvantages of AI translation tools, and assist in improving their accuracy and speed; meanwhile, translators can also be engaged in the creation and management of translation memory and terminology database from the point of view of their own translation needs.

References: [1]Shi Chen.Translators' role transformation under the trend of artificial intelligence[J]. Science and Technology Information,2020,18(19):6-8.DOI:10.16661/j.cnki.1672-3791.2001-9853-5806. [2]Yang Zhuo, Zhang Yulin, Wei Wei, et al. The present and future of human translation under the influence of artificial intelligence[J]. Overseas English,2022,(13):45-48.