Lara Translate – offering faithful, fluid, or creative machine translation

When a spoken text is being interpreted, the target text is often less attached to the morpho-syntactical structures of the source text than that of a written translation. Complex sentences are disentangled, so that they are easier to process and represent less of a cognitive load both to interpreters and to listeners, redundancies are smoothed out, implicit information is made explicit or vice versa. This is one of the reasons why interpreters feel that running a speech manuscript through machine translation and reading it out is far from satisfying.

I was all the more intrigued when Translated announced “Lara Translate – the World’s most reliable translator”.

What’s special is that you can choose between a faithful, fluid, or creative translation. A fluid translation promises to be smooth, readable and natural in flow.

And it is also possible to add some words on context, e.g. The King’s Speech 2024 – His Majesty’s most gracious speech to both Houses of Parliament. Interestingly, I once forgot to change the context, so Lara would ask me if I was sure this was Macron’s speech, while what it was translating was the King’s speech and it still said “Macron” in the context note. Kudos for this!

So I thought I just put some typical political speech texts through Lara’s different translation options, and let you be the judge of the outcome. 

You can find all my test translations here or below. In some paragraphs, I have highlighed the differences in blue and translations that changed the meaning of the original in red.

These are some examples (click on the graphs to enlarge):

My first impressions:

All in all, variations are quite moderate. They mainly occur on lexical rather than on syntactical level. The reasons for the variations are not always straightforward. For example, Pension Schemes is translated as “Altersvorsorgesystem” (old-age pension system) in the faithful translation and “Rentensystem” (pension scheme) in the fluid and creative versions.

Creativity often consists in additions that emphasise the meaning of the previous sentence. In some instances, I like the creative translations better than the faithful one, as they tend to be more idiomatic.

These are my first spontaneous impressions. Feel free to browse my test translations, and try Lara yourselves maybe with different types of texts. And of course -please share your comments! ⬇️

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About the author:

Anja Rütten has specialised in tec, information and terminology management since the mid-1990s. She holds a professorship in interpreting studies and Computer-Aided Interpreting at the Cologne University of Applied Sciences.

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Disclaimer:

Views or opinions expressed are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.