It’s a simple question. If machine interpreting is free or much cheaper than humans, why bother paying for humans? Here’s a basic rundown of what you get for your money.

What machine interpreting gets you

Machine interpreting doesn’t cost much, if anything. For your small investment (or no investment) you get a solution that will give you a sense of what was said. You will be able to follow what the speaker is saying and it will sound mostly natural, if stilted. Yet, for the most part, machine interpreting ignores emotions and social context, and can’t check if people are understanding. Unless you have paid a company to build a specific model, it also isn’t going to use the terminology specific to your church, company, or organisation.

What you get for your money when you pay for human interpreting

Human interpreting is expensive. If you manage to get it for less than four figures per language per day for your conference, you are getting a spectacular deal. Even for a one hour meeting, the costs will almost certainly run into hundreds of pounds. Why bother?

For that money, you get people who have prepared for at least as long as your meeting will last. In fact, for some technical meetings, this prep could be several times the length of the actual meeting. That means that their terminology will be the words you use in your church, business, or organisation. They will work hard to carry over the emotions of the speaker and will automatically change how they work to ensure people understand what is going on. Add to that the fact that interpreters adjust to their audience and take decisions that can have a huge impact on how well the event works.

Machine and human interpreting both have their place

Machine interpreting definitely has its place. For one-way communication that is mostly about getting information across, it is already at the point where it can match many human interpreters. That is, so long as there either isn’t any terminology that is unique to you or that you have paid someone to train the system first.

Anything that needs emotion, sensitivity, the ability to adjust to an audience, persuasiveness, powerful speaking, or even just the ability to adjust to the way you say things will be beyond any machine interpreting system. When people will be involved in detailed discussions, when how something is said matters as much as what is said, when it has to be right: that’s when you need humans.

If you use machine interpreting, what you get for your money is information.

If you pay for human interpreting, what you get for your money is results.