11 ms·

For quality translation of complex, non repetitive ideas, a human is, and will always be required. I have been in the translation business field for about 20 y

For quality translation of complex, non repetitive ideas, a human is, and will always be required. I have been in the translation business field for about 20 years now, so I have seen the rise of desktop tools, then server-based solutions, and lastly, of course, cloud-based tools. While each generation is better than the previous, the increments are decreasing. We are based in Canada, where we receive around 300,000 new immigrants per year. That's 6 million over those 20 years. Guess what? Those people are hitting the job market, and now, their children too. Consequence: the overall quality of English texts is noticably decreasing, from ALL of our customers. I notice the names, and they are not your typical English, French, German, Italian or Ukrainian names (traditional settler groups in Canada). We do more and more of what is called "transcreation", a fancy way to say complete re-interpretation of a text. We basically extract the main ideas, and re-write the whole thing, because basing the translation on the provided source text always yield disappointing results. I really don't see how machines could distill the ideas out of a text and reinterpret them in a nice way. I can see AI work for short, simple, well-written texts. Heck, even long manuals with repetitive blocks of text from manual to manual. But with creative, complex text: still a looooong way baby!

newsbinator 8y ago
What kind of document benefits from "transcreation"?
- falsedan 8y ago
  I assume texts created by desktop tools, then server-based solutions, and lastly, of course, cloud-based tools.
- daniel-cussen 8y ago
  I've also translated and yeah, it means going from scratch and becoming not only the translator but the writer of the text. You show the client, "is this what you meant?" And THEN you translate THAT.
- petepete 8y ago
  I used to work for a Language Service Provider (LSP). Typically it's used in marketing material, because a directly-translated slogan or message might might not 'work' in another language or culture. It might just sound bad or clunky, or it could even be offensive in certain contexts. As others have said, the resulting text should convey the same meaning in the same tone, but needn't be word-for-word correct.
  - iandioch 8y ago
    A good example of this going wrong is described here, with the "spunk" debacle: http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2016/05/time-coca-cola-tried-sell-bottled-tap-water-england-hilarity-ensued/ http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2016/05/time-coca-co...
yters 8y ago
Arguably impossible for AI, since sufficiently complex language can be Turing complete, and thus general understanding requires solving the halting problem.
- melling 8y ago
  There’s something in the human brain that can’t be replicated?
  - nine_k 8y ago
    When we will have created human-level AI, changes in language translation will likely be a minor detail on the background of other changes in the world.
  - ekianjo 8y ago
    Your question sounds like you assume we have a perfect understanding of the brain. At best, our understanding is still very much peripheral. We have no idea how consciousness forms, even if we roughly know where it is located.
    - melling 8y ago
      No, I didn’t assume we have a perfect understanding of the human brain, simply that nothing magical is happening and that we will eventually be able to better understand it.
      - yters 8y ago
        Why don't you think there is something magical happening in the brain?
  - frostburg 8y ago
    No, there is no reason to think that the human brain is capable of computing anything that isn't Church-Turing computable. Luckily no translation actually requires a "general solution" of the problem formally.
cjohansson 8y ago
I remember when Google announced their recent updated translation engine and Swedish and Finnish translations got significantly worse despite the marketing messages. I don't see progress, rather regress, in the computer translation area at all but services with human translators are becoming more usable thanks to the Internet and I think that area will see progress in the future.
- Avamander 8y ago
  Speaking of Finnish. Finnish and Estonian both I think have the problem that can't even be solved, they don't have gendered pronouns but proper English sentences require that information, which means that translations to English are weird-sounding to say the least.
  - cjohansson 8y ago
    Yes Finnish seems to be especially hard to translate, Google and Bing often produce English that is close to gibberish
  - nradov 8y ago
    The problem can sometimes be solved by inferring pronoun gender from the surrounding context.
  - InitialLastName 8y ago
    I wonder if this is getting easier as certain genres of English writing transition to using non-gendered pronouns.
growtofill 8y ago
> I have seen the rise of desktop tools, then server-based solutions, and lastly, of course, cloud-based tools. While each generation is better than the previous, the increments are decreasing. Could you share what tools you are currently using?
- luxpir 8y ago
  I think OP is referring to the widely used CAT (computer-aided translation) tools that save every sentence you translate into a translation memory (XML file, known as TMX, usually) to be auto-inserted when those sentences (segments) re-occur. It can be a huge timesaver. Sometimes identical segments need different translations, so they still need checking. Most of these CAT tools integrate machine translation at some level, either through their own engines or APIs. This is traditionally to save the translator time on the simple segments (numbers and their formatting, lists of countries, place names etc.) but can also be good for avoiding multiple dictionary lookups in unfamiliar fields. Obviously professional translators should avoid working in fields they are unfamiliar with, but there are always new terms and technologies to contend with. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-assisted_translation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-assisted_translation As for the incremental improvements decreasing, that's a tricky statement to make with AI/MT creeping ever more into the software translators use daily. Might be more representative of OP not exploring all new features in the software they use.
  - not_a_terrorist 8y ago
    Excellent answer, except your last paragraph! I have used pretty much any and all cutting edge tools on the market. If anything in some instances, it creates even more proofreading/reviewing work. That being said, as I explained to another commenter above, I foresee several useful use-cases for MT (and there are already are some!). I see them as mostly a separate field from human translation work, in parallel, with little overlap.
  - ivan_ah 8y ago
    Thx for the pointer to TMX. I need to do some computer-aided translation, and was about to roll my own file format for parallel-strings, but always better to choose something existing. Seems there is quite a bit of tools that support it too...
ewiewi 8y ago
I agree with your overall comment, but could you elaborate on the link between > [Immigrants] are hitting the job market, and now, their children too. and > the overall quality of English texts is noticably decreasing, from ALL of our customers ?
- nashashmi 8y ago
  > hitting the job market, and now, their children too. The immigrants are in play. > the overall quality of English texts is noticably decreasing and they are changing the landscape beyond just economy.
- not_a_terrorist 8y ago
  I am not trying to start a culture war or to pity the general English skills of recent immigrants and their family, far from it. They do their best, and we can only congratulate them for their efforts. I am not here to spew out racist generalisations, let's all stay very calm. What I am saying is that we are seeing more and more locally produced Engrish, Chinaglish, RussianGlish, Penjabi-glish or who-knows-what-glish! And when I look at the name of the submitter of those texts, it's usually a typical recent immigrant name. But OF COURSE, we have Wilson's and Taylor's who write in horrendous English too. I also am not saying all immigrants are idiots and cannot write in English, some are truly excellent, just as much as your typical "native". What I am saying, is that with volume, that very occurrence of bad English is increasing. That's it. I can see how very unorthodox English style could be a challenge for AI.
sametmax 8y ago
Technical solutions are only a workaround, not a proper solution. A solution to a problem that have little benefit of existing anyway. I think it's about time humanity decides to stop the ego trip and declare english as the earth official language. No need to kill other languages, every people are free to use them as much as they want. But really, all __new__ documents, medias, displays, pieces of information, should be translated to english as well. And it should be mandatory at school, as well as to get any administrative position. I'm french. My country has a VERY strong view on the local language protection. But promoting your culture doesn't have to be in contradiction with reuniting humanity. Peace, democracy, exchange, cooperation, archiving, education: they are too hard to do in hundreds of languages. It's a waste of resources, and a hindrance to the most important challenges of humanity. Esperanto never won, written chinese is way too complicated and english is already everywhere. Before trying to share the same money, or abolish borders, live in harmony or reach any ideal at all, we gotta take the big rocks off the road. Not being able to understand your neighbor is a terrible curse for our specie, and easier to solve than war or famine. Actually it could be part of the solution to them. And since those things take a long time, we better start now.
- yosito 8y ago
  I agree with you, but I think this makes more sense to someone in Europe where being multilingual is the norm. In the US, a lot of people only speak English which leads to at least two objections to this idea. First, and this is the objection I grew up with, many people see it as unfair to require everyone in the world to speak "our" language. And second, this is the one that concerns me more these days, is that being monolingual makes it harder to understand your neighbors even if they've learned the same language as you as a second language. In the US, we're extremely intolerant of people who have varying dialects or accents in English. In addition, if you don't speak a second language it's hard to be aware of which figures of speech and other idioms you may be using that make your own communication less clear. Ultimately, I think we'll end up with English being the common language of humanity. We're already more than half way to that point in terms of geographical regions where one can communicate using English. And though it's not a perfect language, it's pretty well suited to wide scale usage since it's got a large vocabulary and relatively simple grammar. But I don't think having English as a universal language will be without problems.
denzil_correa 8y ago
> the overall quality of English texts is noticably decreasing, from ALL of our customers. Is it possible to qualitatively measure the quality of a text?
- superhuzza 8y ago
  Yeah, I think a pretty good job can be done with sppropriate criteria. This is essentially what grading systems try to achieve - I think the IB program has wrestled a lot with this idea.
- not_a_terrorist 8y ago
  Yes, there are several grading systems. We don't use them. However, when I have to re-read a simple sentence or paragraph 4-5 times, and perharps read the whole text or even search about a product in order to understand what they are trying to say, then it's a pretty clear indication the text is muddy!
luxpir 8y ago
Also in the industry and I have a few counterpoints. 1) That the general level of Canadian English is reducing due to immigrants is ludicrous. You have a significant burden of proof for statements like that. 2) Transcreation is usually understood to mean the translation of creative/marketing texts where cultural and local norms are taken into account (think slogans, taglines etc.). It does not typically mean that you re-write the source text, adding new ideas and concepts. All you are doing in that case is fixing a bad source text. Sometimes we get blamed for translating a bad source accurately, so it's a fine line. But it isn't transcreation. 3) "Creative, complex text" does not make up the majority of a commercial translation operation's workload. Literary translation is a fraction of a fraction of the global translation demand. AI/neural net machine translation works for many, many commercial texts. I'd go so far as to say it works for the majority in the major language pairs. Essentially it is recombining known good, reliable human translations in grammatically sound ways, even using idiom correctly where appropriate. The quality of the output depends on the quality of the input, and as such machine translations can be limited by the corpus it draws from. For example, the swathes of the freely available legal or regulatory texts it receives from the EU. These texts can use 'globalised language' at times, avoiding anything tricky to translate in the other languages that they are to be presented in, but that edges into a side issue of the globalisation of English/languages in general. Overall, I hear a lot of this from the industry, "oh, it'll never work well enough to replace my job", but that's how you get blindsided. Accepting that it works well for major language pairs at this point is a good first step to accepting a changing industry. That the industry is growing, and fast, may be down to any and all of a) increased awareness of translation's ROI, b) increased awareness of translation itself through the ever-present dream of ubiquitous, perfect babelfish-like translation and c) globalisation maturing into its final form. There's plenty of work for translators and LSPs for a good while yet, but spinning the line about how bad MT is does not help further the cause.
- sofon 8y ago
  I'm curious as to why automated translation seems to be so bad for Japanese<->English. Is Japanese really such an outlier? English <-> Chinese seems more reasonable. Translation between European languages I would guess is an almost solved problem, but how about between language groups in general?
bpizzi 8y ago
> I really don't see how machines could distill the ideas out of a text and reinterpret them in a nice way. Well, machines are already doing it with paintings: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1508.06576v2.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1508.06576v2.pdf. There's no technical reason for not being able to achieve this sort of 'machine creativity' with texts. It's just a harder version of the same problem. > I can see AI work for short, simple, well-written texts. Heck, even long manuals with repetitive blocks of text from manual to manual. But with creative, complex text: still a looooong way baby! I (carefully, waiting for experts' feedback) disagree. ML works on data and algorithms: give a deep RNN a great lot of human made translations, time/cpu to produce a good model, and I think you would be astonished by the results. Data's complexity is of little hindrance here, because the algorithm does not try to understands the data (as we humans like to think we're doing when reading), it's just trying to infer a solution based on learned behaviors. And it's 'just' ML, AI will come when your computer tell you that this specific text makes it sad, for example.
- rimliu 8y ago
  I think "good model" is the hard part here and very far from being achieved.
zhonwang 8y ago
>For quality translation of complex, non repetitive ideas, a human is, and will always be required. This is almost certainly not true.
bena 8y ago
> While each generation is better than the previous, the increments are decreasing. Diminishing returns. Getting 90% of the way there is easier than getting that last 10%. Because once you take care of all of the easy problems like simple word substitution and some of the more troublesome problems like basic syntax, you start finding yourself facing the really hard problems. Stuff like idioms or words with multiple connotations in one language but lack them in another language. And also there's the issue is that we currently don't have the skill to articulate what's missing. As a species. We haven't advanced our knowledge of our own thought processes to explain exactly how a certain bit of translated text just doesn't work. We know it doesn't, we know it should be like "this" instead, but we don't actually know why in a way we can describe to others. But I think that's one of the things about AI tools, by developing them we get to learn about ourselves.
dalbasal 8y ago
Translation comes in a quality spectrum. On one end, you have simple semantic/word translators. As long as the original text is written simply, a user will be able to understand >50% of the meaning, whatever can be understood without sytax. On the other end of the spectrum, translation is rewriting while trying to maintain the original tone, intent and other subtle aspects of meaning. This is essentially writing and authorship, and not far from a Turing test. In between, there's a lot of usefulness. Its very feasible to communicate via IM and a free translation service. It's possible to headline-read a paper.
torstenvl 8y ago
For quality translation of complex, non repetitive ideas, a human is, and will always be required. Bookmarked. Let's check back in twenty years. Because - as a linguist, not a translator - I strongly disagree.
acd 8y ago
The quality of written text could get worse by the general population reading a lot of misspelled chat, sms and text messages instead of reading correct English from proof read quality sources such as books. My understanding is that some translators are using machine translation for bulk translation and then that human professional translations use that as a base for translating.

newsbinator 8y ago

What kind of document benefits from "transcreation"?

falsedan 8y ago
I assume texts created by desktop tools, then server-based solutions, and lastly, of course, cloud-based tools.
daniel-cussen 8y ago
I've also translated and yeah, it means going from scratch and becoming not only the translator but the writer of the text. You show the client, "is this what you meant?" And THEN you translate THAT.
petepete 8y ago
I used to work for a Language Service Provider (LSP). Typically it's used in marketing material, because a directly-translated slogan or message might might not 'work' in another language or culture. It might just sound bad or clunky, or it could even be offensive in certain contexts. As others have said, the resulting text should convey the same meaning in the same tone, but needn't be word-for-word correct.
- iandioch 8y ago
  A good example of this going wrong is described here, with the "spunk" debacle: http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2016/05/time-coca-cola-tried-sell-bottled-tap-water-england-hilarity-ensued/ http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2016/05/time-coca-co...

yters 8y ago

Arguably impossible for AI, since sufficiently complex language can be Turing complete, and thus general understanding requires solving the halting problem.

melling 8y ago
There’s something in the human brain that can’t be replicated?
- nine_k 8y ago
  When we will have created human-level AI, changes in language translation will likely be a minor detail on the background of other changes in the world.
- ekianjo 8y ago
  Your question sounds like you assume we have a perfect understanding of the brain. At best, our understanding is still very much peripheral. We have no idea how consciousness forms, even if we roughly know where it is located.
  - melling 8y ago
    No, I didn’t assume we have a perfect understanding of the human brain, simply that nothing magical is happening and that we will eventually be able to better understand it.
    - yters 8y ago
      Why don't you think there is something magical happening in the brain?
- frostburg 8y ago
  No, there is no reason to think that the human brain is capable of computing anything that isn't Church-Turing computable. Luckily no translation actually requires a "general solution" of the problem formally.

cjohansson 8y ago

I remember when Google announced their recent updated translation engine and Swedish and Finnish translations got significantly worse despite the marketing messages. I don't see progress, rather regress, in the computer translation area at all but services with human translators are becoming more usable thanks to the Internet and I think that area will see progress in the future.

Avamander 8y ago
Speaking of Finnish. Finnish and Estonian both I think have the problem that can't even be solved, they don't have gendered pronouns but proper English sentences require that information, which means that translations to English are weird-sounding to say the least.
- cjohansson 8y ago
  Yes Finnish seems to be especially hard to translate, Google and Bing often produce English that is close to gibberish
- nradov 8y ago
  The problem can sometimes be solved by inferring pronoun gender from the surrounding context.
- InitialLastName 8y ago
  I wonder if this is getting easier as certain genres of English writing transition to using non-gendered pronouns.

growtofill 8y ago

> I have seen the rise of desktop tools, then server-based solutions, and lastly, of course, cloud-based tools. While each generation is better than the previous, the increments are decreasing. Could you share what tools you are currently using?

luxpir 8y ago
I think OP is referring to the widely used CAT (computer-aided translation) tools that save every sentence you translate into a translation memory (XML file, known as TMX, usually) to be auto-inserted when those sentences (segments) re-occur. It can be a huge timesaver. Sometimes identical segments need different translations, so they still need checking. Most of these CAT tools integrate machine translation at some level, either through their own engines or APIs. This is traditionally to save the translator time on the simple segments (numbers and their formatting, lists of countries, place names etc.) but can also be good for avoiding multiple dictionary lookups in unfamiliar fields. Obviously professional translators should avoid working in fields they are unfamiliar with, but there are always new terms and technologies to contend with. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-assisted_translation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-assisted_translation As for the incremental improvements decreasing, that's a tricky statement to make with AI/MT creeping ever more into the software translators use daily. Might be more representative of OP not exploring all new features in the software they use.
- not_a_terrorist 8y ago
  Excellent answer, except your last paragraph! I have used pretty much any and all cutting edge tools on the market. If anything in some instances, it creates even more proofreading/reviewing work. That being said, as I explained to another commenter above, I foresee several useful use-cases for MT (and there are already are some!). I see them as mostly a separate field from human translation work, in parallel, with little overlap.
- ivan_ah 8y ago
  Thx for the pointer to TMX. I need to do some computer-aided translation, and was about to roll my own file format for parallel-strings, but always better to choose something existing. Seems there is quite a bit of tools that support it too...

ewiewi 8y ago

I agree with your overall comment, but could you elaborate on the link between > [Immigrants] are hitting the job market, and now, their children too. and > the overall quality of English texts is noticably decreasing, from ALL of our customers ?

nashashmi 8y ago
> hitting the job market, and now, their children too. The immigrants are in play. > the overall quality of English texts is noticably decreasing and they are changing the landscape beyond just economy.
not_a_terrorist 8y ago
I am not trying to start a culture war or to pity the general English skills of recent immigrants and their family, far from it. They do their best, and we can only congratulate them for their efforts. I am not here to spew out racist generalisations, let's all stay very calm. What I am saying is that we are seeing more and more locally produced Engrish, Chinaglish, RussianGlish, Penjabi-glish or who-knows-what-glish! And when I look at the name of the submitter of those texts, it's usually a typical recent immigrant name. But OF COURSE, we have Wilson's and Taylor's who write in horrendous English too. I also am not saying all immigrants are idiots and cannot write in English, some are truly excellent, just as much as your typical "native". What I am saying, is that with volume, that very occurrence of bad English is increasing. That's it. I can see how very unorthodox English style could be a challenge for AI.

sametmax 8y ago

Technical solutions are only a workaround, not a proper solution. A solution to a problem that have little benefit of existing anyway. I think it's about time humanity decides to stop the ego trip and declare english as the earth official language. No need to kill other languages, every people are free to use them as much as they want. But really, all __new__ documents, medias, displays, pieces of information, should be translated to english as well. And it should be mandatory at school, as well as to get any administrative position. I'm french. My country has a VERY strong view on the local language protection. But promoting your culture doesn't have to be in contradiction with reuniting humanity. Peace, democracy, exchange, cooperation, archiving, education: they are too hard to do in hundreds of languages. It's a waste of resources, and a hindrance to the most important challenges of humanity. Esperanto never won, written chinese is way too complicated and english is already everywhere. Before trying to share the same money, or abolish borders, live in harmony or reach any ideal at all, we gotta take the big rocks off the road. Not being able to understand your neighbor is a terrible curse for our specie, and easier to solve than war or famine. Actually it could be part of the solution to them. And since those things take a long time, we better start now.

yosito 8y ago
I agree with you, but I think this makes more sense to someone in Europe where being multilingual is the norm. In the US, a lot of people only speak English which leads to at least two objections to this idea. First, and this is the objection I grew up with, many people see it as unfair to require everyone in the world to speak "our" language. And second, this is the one that concerns me more these days, is that being monolingual makes it harder to understand your neighbors even if they've learned the same language as you as a second language. In the US, we're extremely intolerant of people who have varying dialects or accents in English. In addition, if you don't speak a second language it's hard to be aware of which figures of speech and other idioms you may be using that make your own communication less clear. Ultimately, I think we'll end up with English being the common language of humanity. We're already more than half way to that point in terms of geographical regions where one can communicate using English. And though it's not a perfect language, it's pretty well suited to wide scale usage since it's got a large vocabulary and relatively simple grammar. But I don't think having English as a universal language will be without problems.

denzil_correa 8y ago

> the overall quality of English texts is noticably decreasing, from ALL of our customers. Is it possible to qualitatively measure the quality of a text?

superhuzza 8y ago
Yeah, I think a pretty good job can be done with sppropriate criteria. This is essentially what grading systems try to achieve - I think the IB program has wrestled a lot with this idea.
not_a_terrorist 8y ago
Yes, there are several grading systems. We don't use them. However, when I have to re-read a simple sentence or paragraph 4-5 times, and perharps read the whole text or even search about a product in order to understand what they are trying to say, then it's a pretty clear indication the text is muddy!

luxpir 8y ago

Also in the industry and I have a few counterpoints. 1) That the general level of Canadian English is reducing due to immigrants is ludicrous. You have a significant burden of proof for statements like that. 2) Transcreation is usually understood to mean the translation of creative/marketing texts where cultural and local norms are taken into account (think slogans, taglines etc.). It does not typically mean that you re-write the source text, adding new ideas and concepts. All you are doing in that case is fixing a bad source text. Sometimes we get blamed for translating a bad source accurately, so it's a fine line. But it isn't transcreation. 3) "Creative, complex text" does not make up the majority of a commercial translation operation's workload. Literary translation is a fraction of a fraction of the global translation demand. AI/neural net machine translation works for many, many commercial texts. I'd go so far as to say it works for the majority in the major language pairs. Essentially it is recombining known good, reliable human translations in grammatically sound ways, even using idiom correctly where appropriate. The quality of the output depends on the quality of the input, and as such machine translations can be limited by the corpus it draws from. For example, the swathes of the freely available legal or regulatory texts it receives from the EU. These texts can use 'globalised language' at times, avoiding anything tricky to translate in the other languages that they are to be presented in, but that edges into a side issue of the globalisation of English/languages in general. Overall, I hear a lot of this from the industry, "oh, it'll never work well enough to replace my job", but that's how you get blindsided. Accepting that it works well for major language pairs at this point is a good first step to accepting a changing industry. That the industry is growing, and fast, may be down to any and all of a) increased awareness of translation's ROI, b) increased awareness of translation itself through the ever-present dream of ubiquitous, perfect babelfish-like translation and c) globalisation maturing into its final form. There's plenty of work for translators and LSPs for a good while yet, but spinning the line about how bad MT is does not help further the cause.

sofon 8y ago
I'm curious as to why automated translation seems to be so bad for Japanese<->English. Is Japanese really such an outlier? English <-> Chinese seems more reasonable. Translation between European languages I would guess is an almost solved problem, but how about between language groups in general?

bpizzi 8y ago

> I really don't see how machines could distill the ideas out of a text and reinterpret them in a nice way. Well, machines are already doing it with paintings: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1508.06576v2.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1508.06576v2.pdf. There's no technical reason for not being able to achieve this sort of 'machine creativity' with texts. It's just a harder version of the same problem. > I can see AI work for short, simple, well-written texts. Heck, even long manuals with repetitive blocks of text from manual to manual. But with creative, complex text: still a looooong way baby! I (carefully, waiting for experts' feedback) disagree. ML works on data and algorithms: give a deep RNN a great lot of human made translations, time/cpu to produce a good model, and I think you would be astonished by the results. Data's complexity is of little hindrance here, because the algorithm does not try to understands the data (as we humans like to think we're doing when reading), it's just trying to infer a solution based on learned behaviors. And it's 'just' ML, AI will come when your computer tell you that this specific text makes it sad, for example.

rimliu 8y ago
I think "good model" is the hard part here and very far from being achieved.

zhonwang 8y ago

>For quality translation of complex, non repetitive ideas, a human is, and will always be required. This is almost certainly not true.

bena 8y ago

> While each generation is better than the previous, the increments are decreasing. Diminishing returns. Getting 90% of the way there is easier than getting that last 10%. Because once you take care of all of the easy problems like simple word substitution and some of the more troublesome problems like basic syntax, you start finding yourself facing the really hard problems. Stuff like idioms or words with multiple connotations in one language but lack them in another language. And also there's the issue is that we currently don't have the skill to articulate what's missing. As a species. We haven't advanced our knowledge of our own thought processes to explain exactly how a certain bit of translated text just doesn't work. We know it doesn't, we know it should be like "this" instead, but we don't actually know why in a way we can describe to others. But I think that's one of the things about AI tools, by developing them we get to learn about ourselves.

dalbasal 8y ago

Translation comes in a quality spectrum. On one end, you have simple semantic/word translators. As long as the original text is written simply, a user will be able to understand >50% of the meaning, whatever can be understood without sytax. On the other end of the spectrum, translation is rewriting while trying to maintain the original tone, intent and other subtle aspects of meaning. This is essentially writing and authorship, and not far from a Turing test. In between, there's a lot of usefulness. Its very feasible to communicate via IM and a free translation service. It's possible to headline-read a paper.

torstenvl 8y ago

For quality translation of complex, non repetitive ideas, a human is, and will always be required. Bookmarked. Let's check back in twenty years. Because - as a linguist, not a translator - I strongly disagree.

acd 8y ago

The quality of written text could get worse by the general population reading a lot of misspelled chat, sms and text messages instead of reading correct English from proof read quality sources such as books. My understanding is that some translators are using machine translation for bulk translation and then that human professional translations use that as a base for translating.