AI works in translation but not in my field

[Patricia Pringle]

Recently, there has been a lot of discussion about AI in the media here in the US. I heard a lawyer say that AI is not suitable for their work, writing, briefs, etc. which require training and study and creative thought, but “but it works great for translation!” Hollywood writers who are now trying to negotiate limits to use of AI, such as not mining their work, are happy to assert “but AI works great for Translations, nowadays, Translators start with the AI generated translation and clean it up.“ According to the media, it is now a fact that AI works great for translation. I have not heard anyone on the media attempt to correct this impression.

Patricia Pringle
ATA certified Japanese to English translator
Sent from my iPhone

[Matthew Schlecht]

On Tue, May 23, 2023 at 9:52 PM Patricia Pringle <patr...@tedsims.com> wrote:

Recently, there has been a lot of discussion about AI in the media here in the US. I heard a lawyer say that AI is not suitable for their work, writing, briefs, etc. which require training and study and creative thought, but “but it works great for translation!” Hollywood writers who are now trying to negotiate limits to use of AI, such as not mining their work, are happy to assert “but AI works great for Translations, nowadays, Translators start with the AI generated translation and clean it up.“ According to the media, it is now a fact that AI works great for translation. I have not heard anyone on the media attempt to correct this impression.

In my (admittedly prejudiced) opinion, there is precious little truly good writing in evidence in television programs and cinema these days.

What sells is very formulaic drivel, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if someone manages to prepare a corpus from the last 30-50 years worth of scripts and then feeds it to an AI that will then be perfectly capable of generating a steady and cheap stream of such drivel for mass consumption.

If memory serves correctly, Aldous Huxley predicted that in his dystopian novel "Brave New World" (1932): mass market machine-written novels.

Matthew Schlecht, PhD
Word Alchemy Translation, Inc.
Newark, DE, USA
wordalchemytranslation.com

[Charlie Milroy]

The reason why people think that AI or Google can translate anything is that it gives an answer that sounds about right to them and in many situations getting the gist is enough for many purposes such as making an online purchase. You can do your own research on legal and medical issues or get an AI system to do it for you and it will also get it about right. The question that anyone needs to ask themselves is: is about right close enough?

We have Youtube and DIY videos, yet we still hire contractors to do stuff. I can choose which parts of work to do myself and which parts I really need/want to be done professionally.

As an industry, we have been very bad at explaining why translation is not just an area to save on costs. I always explain it by making the kinds of comparisons I made above.

Charlie MIlroy