By Adelaida
There is no doubt that IT technology has developed very quickly in the last decades and it has been implemented in the industry as well as in our personal life. The key questions are, does technology help us or does it affect us negatively? does this development carry advantages or disadvantages? Indeed, we can find different opinions and points of view.
As quoted above, IT technology has been implemented in most businesses and the whole process of production, from manufacturing to logistics and office work. In fact, there are some sectors of the industry that work totally digital, without physical offices or premises. This is the case of digital banks like ING Direct (in Europe) or platforms that sell furniture, clothes, cosmetics, etc. Obviously, this development has obliged workers to focus on their digital skills and adapt to this new environment. That is to say, digital skills and competencies are a MUST in the current labor market.
However, does this development affect the labor market in a negative way or it only implies advantages? Certainly, it is a complicated question. On the one hand, there exist certain job positions that are increasingly disappearing, such as cashiers, bank officers, etc. A case in point is the Bank BBVA in Europe, which has fired 1,800 workers this year because the bank operates more and more through the app. On the other hand, IT development is creating new jobs, like Data Analysts, Front-End Developers, etc. In fact, the demand for these technological professionals is so huge that Programming Schools around the world are being created and offer intensive courses to form these new workers.
Technology also plays an important role in our personal lives. Nowadays, everybody has a smartphone, a computer at home, or an Ipad. We mainly use apps like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram to be connected and be updated and informed. So, the main use is that of communication. Even old people have adapted to the use of the Internet in their smartphones, sometimes because of necessity (to operate with banks, for example), sometimes because of pleasure. Similarly, young kids use technology, and sometimes they are addressed as the "digital generation". So, the new and current form of illiteracy is the lack of digital skills.
Obviously, IT technology has also expanded to the translation field and translators had to adapt to this new way of working. And what are the main implications of this adaptation? Again, we had to develop our digital skills and learn how to use software related to translation. This specific software is called CAT Tools and nowadays most translators use it.
CAT Tools make work faster and more effectively and accurately and it also helps translators in all the translation processes, starting with the creation of glossaries and lasting with the review of the translation. As commented in some videos, there are different kinds of CAT Tools. The first group corresponds to Translation Memories (TM), like Trados, Star, Transit, etc. Basically, this software has a translation memory with segments already translated, which makes us save time and improve quality. Besides, we can also add translated segments while working, so that another translator can use them. The second group is the multilingual dictionaries, such as Wordreference, Reverso, Linguee, etc. The main advantage is that they offer translation of a lot of languages and that they are constantly updated (contrary to the traditional dictionaries). I would consider Corpus and Glossaries as the third group. We easily find online Corpus of specific topics, like in Linguee and Reverso, which provide us similar types of text in the target language. Besides, it is also easy to find Glossaries of specific topics in the source language as well as in the target one. Finally, I would include Terminology Management Software, like Sketch Engine, for example. This kind of software allows us to look for terminology and save this terminology for future projects so that we can take profit from it and be consistent with important and specific terminology. The use of this software is so extensive that we cannot live without it.
However, there is a group of people skeptical about this IT development since they are afraid that machines can substitute human work. This group claims that machine translation, for example, will in the future replace human translators and other processes involved in the translation process. In fact, automatic translation works really efficiently with languages with similar grammars, like Spanish, Catalan, and French. As I commented in other articles, some important newspapers in Catalonia use the automatic translation for the Catalan version of the newspaper, though a proofreader always checks there are no mistakes. Contrary to this opinion, it has been proved that IT development has a positive effect on translators because it has expanded the labor market. For example, currently, we can talk about computational linguists or localization engineers. Furthermore, the amount of texts on the web to translate is enormous and it increases more and more.
In conclusion, IT development is essential in translation, like in many other fields. It has been proved that it carries advantages that facilitate the work of translators and the whole translations process and it also has expanded the labor market of linguists. For this reason, digital skills are nowadays a must.
