The question whether one day the living and breathing human interpreters and translators will be replaced by the cold and uncompromising computer "brain" is going on hot in the light of the recent break-through made in the field of artificial intellect. Even such a seemingly non-complex thing as a smart-phone today can claim to have "a mind of its own" (just think about the Siri AI software piece introduced in the latest iPhone 4S). Machines are smart in those terms that they certainly have access and capability of an instant memorization of hundreds of words and expressions and even whole dictionaries. But can a computer be as good as a skilled human when it comes to the slight nuances and idioms, when minute details constitute what is universally called "the beauty of the language"?
The good news is that it seems that translators won't be out of work because of computers. Quite on the contrary - computers get more and more integrated into the work of humans. A good and efficient translation agency in London seeks balance between the Computer Aided Translation (CAT) Tools and the brainstorming work of a team of professionals who can deal both with digital glossaries and crumbling pages of some old directory that hadn't been reissued for so long it's gone to Public Domain. Such balance of the old and the new makes more sense in the translation work than exclusive employment of either old or bleeding-edge new technologies.
London boasts a large number of enterprises dealing in the language matters. New technologies get developed and incorporated into the translation work every day.
Brand new software in the hands of a skilled translator can work miracles - from OCR of a barely readable text in a dead exotic language to deciphering a World War I coded message. London interpreters that broke the codes of the infamous Enigma encoding machine could be proud of their followers and trade disciples now because the practice of incorporating technology into human translations booms as never before.
The London trend spread throughout the world and holds fast in the localization and technical translation field. Translator basically needs more skills of an editor when CAT tools are applied, but this is not a substitution of duties - this is where the evolution of a translator's work leads.
