NWTN's Social Saturday, January 2026 - DeepL, MT & Me: who is the expert now?

Our reason for being in Manchester was to attend NWTN’s Social Saturday presentation by Nicole van den Wittenboer, MITI, Member of NWTN and Coordinator of the ITI Dutch Network  initially scheduled to focus on DeepL but, in practice, covering MT generally.

Nicole asked us to divide ourselves up into two groups – one group comprising those of us who feel more positive than negative about MT and the other group who were more negative than positive. Initially the positive group was the larger group but, by the end of the event, most of the negative group had become more positive!

Positive perceptions about MT compared to human translation were that it:

• Can be more cost-effective for some clients
• Is more likely to be used by where the stakes aren’t high ones such as in low-financial-value work, non-legal and non-commercially sensitive type work
• Is likely to meet deadlines much faster

Negative perceptions were based on:

• Free MT is already adversely causing a downturn in work for some colleagues
• Not adopting MT and being labelled a dinosaur
• Adopting MT and then risking reputational damage
• Why bother with MT? Human checks will still be necessary
• Hallucinations might appear, such as words not in the original text

General themes revolved around quality issues such as:

• Variable quality depending on language combinations: for example, NL – EN (very good) and DE – EN (quite good)
• Less good quality where languages of lesser diffusion due to Large Language Models (LLMs) not yet being sufficiently fed by them 

Nicole is an excellent course leader with a deep (excuse the pun!) knowledge of her subject matter. Her slides were clear and concise. The session was engaging and interactive - very welcome on a Saturday afternoon! It came at the right time for me, as only that week a client had downloaded a free MT 30-page document, got cold feet about an upcoming court hearing and then paid me (a large sum!) to check it! 

In conclusion, we generally agreed that 1) MT will only get better, 2) if you can’t beat colleagues who are accepting MT jobs, then join them!