Of Dragons and Speech Recognition Wizards and Apprentices

Abstract

Despite being used by a minority of professional translators, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems do have a lot of potential for effective integration into professional workflows. A recent survey designed in the University of Leeds Centre for Translation Studies and conducted among professional translators using ASR has led to interesting findings regarding, among others, the influence of such technologies on the quality of the translated output, the productivity of professional translators, and the fine-tuning of workflows in order to account for the advantages and disadvantages of adopting ASR. The survey showed that the advantages outweighed the disadvantages and that professional translators are essentially missing out by not engaging with such technologies more.

Keywords

• Professional Translation
• Automatic Speech Recognition
• ASR
• Computer-Assisted Translation tools
• CAT