Vietnam - The machine translation market springs up in Vietnam (Part 2)

VietNamNet Bridge – A lot of professional translators and interpreters swear not to use translation machines, because they believe that the grey matter in translators’ heads is considered the most important thing in the job. However, they may change their mind in the near future.

Dr Nguyen Ai Viet

The Vietnamese translation market is believed to be worth no less than 200-300 million dollars a year. However, the biggest pieces of the cake, according to analysts, have fallen into the hands of foreign companies.

In principle, domestic companies and freelance translators can expect to find clients from state agencies or organizations. However, it is always difficult for the organizations to find good translators because of the low fees they offer.

After many years of keeping the same translation rates at 45,000-50,000 dong per page, the Ministry of Finance has decided to raise the rates to 70,000 dong and 90,000 dong for English-Vietnamese and Vietnamese-English translation, respectively. Besides, it is also offering different rates which are well higher – 140,000 dong per page for English-Vietnamese, and 150,000 dong for Vietnamese-English.

These rates prove to be closer to the market prices at 7 dollars and 10 dollars per page. Dr Viet said he cannot understand why there exist such different rates.

A lot of professional translators and interpreters swear not to use translation machines, because they believe that the grey matter in translators’ heads is considered the most important thing in the job. Meanwhile, people also do not believe in translation machines.

However, it is now the time for Vietnamese people to get enlightened, as the importance of machine translation has been recognized for the last half a century in the world.

Dr Viet, who heads a big information technology center belonging to one of the biggest universities in Vietnam, has been joining forces with his team to write a translation software piece, hoping to create the most reliable translation machine in Vietnam.

“Our software piece is altogether different from Google in both the procedure and quality,” Viet said confidently.

“No one can understand the Vietnamese language better than Vietnamese people,” Viet said. “Therefore, information technology is just a tool to create the software piece. The quality of machine translation is decided by the quality of the language support software,” he continued.

The National Translation & Interpretation Center under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, has ordered the English-Vietnamese translation machine with the group of scientists headed by Dr Viet. The translation machine has been built up with the total cost of 100,000 dollars.

In fact, the English-Vietnamese translation machine of Google is just priced at less than 10 million dong, but it cannot provide the things Vietnamese people need.

Viet said that with the “effective weapon” – the translation machine – he feels confident in any competition with other rivals. The machine allows translators to increase the translation speed by three times, while ensuring the high quality of services.

Dr Viet has revealed that he has accepted a job of translating for the Ministry of Information and Communication at the very competitive rates of 100,000-150,000 dong per page. It did not take Viet much exertion with the job, because Viet has the excellent translation machine.

The scientist has invested 600,000 dollars to design the two-way (English-Vietnamese and Vietnamese-English) translation support system. The system made debut in 2009 which has been upgraded regularly.

Viet is cherishing a plan to organize a machine translation trade fair to talk about the machine translation market in Vietnam. The special market has been scheduled to open in September, when Vietnam celebrates the 66th anniversary of the National Day.

However, Viet admitted that people still keep indifferent to translation machines. A project on creating a translation machine which can give support in translating six main languages in the world has been put forward, which may cost 1.5 million dollars, has not been welcomed.

Source: Tien phong

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