Machine Translation Editing – a fast and cost-effective solution for large volumes of text

Machine translation is now easily accessible to everyone: with just a few clicks, any text can be displayed in another language. However, it is important to understand that machine-generated translations rarely reach the level of quality one would expect from a professional human translation. Machine translation tools – whether it is Google Translate or another online system – can usually provide a general understanding of the text, but subtle meaning, professional terminology and linguistic style are often distorted or lost.

What does our Machine Translation Editing service mean?

Our service called Machine Translation Editing means that a human translator revises and corrects the machine-generated text. The translator checks the entire content, fixes unclear, misleading or grammatically incorrect sentences, and ensures that the text becomes coherent, readable and logically understandable.

This service does not result in a fully retranslated, high-quality human translation. Instead, it focuses on improving the existing machine translation. Our goal is to correct the most problematic and confusing parts of the text so that the content becomes usable and comprehensible, even if it does not reach the premium quality of a fully human-produced translation.

In this case, the translator does not “rewrite” the text from scratch, but rather improves, cleans and clarifies it — all with short turnaround times and fast processing.

What are the advantages of Machine Translation Editing?

Machine Translation Editing is essentially a fast and low-cost service. It is particularly beneficial for large volumes of text where the price or turnaround time of a full human translation would not be practical for the client.

• Fast delivery: since the machine translation already exists, the editing process is significantly quicker.
• Cost-effective: more affordable than a complete human translation, especially with lengthy documents.
• Understandable content: the most disruptive errors are corrected, resulting in a text that can be clearly interpreted.

The downside is that the text will not be perfect, stylistically refined or publication-ready, but it is excellent for internal use, general understanding and informational purposes.

When is Machine Translation Editing recommended, and when is it not?

We recommend this service when dealing with large quantities of text and when the client’s primary goal is simply to understand the content. If waiting days or weeks for a fully professional human translation is not worthwhile, machine translation editing can be an ideal compromise.

However, if the text is intended for public or professional use (such as a website, marketing material, contract, legal or technical documentation), we strongly recommend opting for a full human translation, where the translator reworks the entire text from the original language with professional accuracy and stylistic consistency.

Interesting facts about machine translation

The quality of machine translation depends heavily on the tool used and the language pair. The most well-known tool today is Google Translate, but there are hundreds of machine translation engines available online. Being the most popular does not necessarily make it the best. Many specialised translation systems exist that perform better in certain fields, but even these can produce completely nonsensical results at times.

Another important factor is the language pair. Not all languages can be translated by machines with the same level of accuracy. Hungarian, for example, is one of the more difficult languages for machine translation systems. Hungarian–English, English–Hungarian, Hungarian–German and German–Hungarian translations are usually acceptable, but for rarer language pairs the quality decreases significantly.

Languages such as English, French and Spanish tend to produce relatively good machine translation results. For short, general texts, the output may even resemble human translation. However, it is crucial to remember that understanding context, interpreting subtle meaning and recognising situational nuances are tasks that only the human mind can perform reliably. Even simple situations can easily mislead a translation engine.

Our recommendation: always treat machine translations with caution. Do not rely on them for important decisions, legal matters or business communication. If you want to be certain, choose Machine Translation Editing or a full human translation for guaranteed quality.