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I would be very interested in reading about people’s experiences using machine translation—either text translation or spoken interpretation—in work-related cont

I would be very interested in reading about people’s experiences using machine translation—either text translation or spoken interpretation—in work-related contexts. When the participants in a back-and-forth e-mail exchange, for example, do not share a common language and one or both use translation software to communicate, are they able accomplish what they need to do reasonably well? Or does the communication break down at some point? Can live meetings be conducted successfully when one or more active participant uses MT interpretation? Or are there too many cases of faulty voice recognition and mistranslation for the meeting to proceed comfortably? I ask because I have been thinking and writing for several years about the implications of improved machine translation for foreign-language education. I know how accurate, and inaccurate, MT can be at the sentence-by-sentence level, especially between Japanese and English, and researchers I know are starting to study how some language learners use MT. But it’s been hard to get a handle on the extent to which the software is actually used in real-life contexts.

iagovar 6y ago
I've only used text translation for articles and such, and the only translator that it's up there, from all I've tried (quite a lot), seems to be DeepL. I speak spanish, english, french and some Portuguese, and deepL is consistently better than others. That's not saying it's perfect. It still makes mistakes and uses weird wording sometimes, but it needs way less correction.
- simias 6y ago
  Agreed, deepl is pretty impressive, although its language selection is a lot smaller than, say, Google Translate. The usual caveats of automated translation apply though. "Take it" will be translated as "tomem-no" in Portuguese, "возьми его" in Russian and "prenez-le" in French, every time assuming that the "it" is masculine (or possibly neutral, in the Russian case). Depending on context that could be confusing if the "it" is feminine in the target language's grammar. There's also a bit of a mess with the conjugations. The Portuguese version uses "tomem", which is imperative plural (y'all take it), the french version uses "prenez" that's either imperative plural or formal/polite imperative singular, while the Russian version uses friendly/familiar imperative singular (thou, as English used to use) instead of the more polite and/or plural возьмите. Of course those are all valid translations for "take it" in English, but in a given context only one of them will be intended by the speaker. And those are all indo-european languages which share a common (if sometimes distant) heritage when it comes to grammar and social customs. If I spoke Japanese (which uses a complex system of honorifics) I'm sure I could come up with much more awkward translations. In Deepl's defense however it manages to piece it together if I give it more context, for instance "The box is on my desk. Please take it." is translated as "Коробка на моем столе. Пожалуйста, возьмите ее." where it uses the correct её for the (feminine) box, and the adding "please" made it switch to the polite form of брать. But of course in casual conversation through some online messaging application piecing together the context will be a lot harder in many cases. You have to deal with slang, incomplete sentence fragments, typos etc...
  - ngcc_hk 6y ago
    Unfortunately just text no audio and no real time.
llarsson 6y ago
Turn on automated close captioning on youtube, and see how often it gets the speech wrong, even for English. Now imagine feeding that into a translation service. The output just barely manages to get the broadest meaning across. If even that. If it is also supposed to be real time and able to handle a conversation at a realistic pace... just forget it. This is just too be able to list it as a feature, it's not actually going to be good or work.
jhugo 6y ago
We've been testing realtime translation of realtime captions in real meetings lately, with a view to basically answering the same questions you're raising. Using Google's translation API, the number of mistakes is reasonably low, and it's absolutely possible to have a comfortable meeting even when technical topics are discussed, as long as participants are aware of the possibility of mistranslation and take care to avoid resulting miscommunication. It's far from perfect, but it's good enough with those caveats. We have plans to test out several others including DeepL.
Roark66 6y ago
Well, I'm not sure if my experience can be classed as "in work related context" as I didn't use the software at work, but people I communicated with were. Specifically, I know only few words in German, but I often buy stuff from companies in Germany. Most of those companies have an English speaking customer service, but this one huge Web shop didn't. They had an item in stock, I bought it... and then nothing. 1k EUR later days passed and there is no status updates nothing. I heard Skype has a translation service so I decided to try it by myself first. Unfortunately Skype's service is quite inconvenient to use with the other party not expecting it. Basically Skype implements the translation as a third (virtual) person on the call. That translator then simply repeats what it can hear in target language, but both parties can hear each other's original voice. This way to use an auto translator is very confusing for an unsuspecting person on the other end. So in the end I did something different. I set my android mobile with the phonecall on loudspeaker, used another android phone to open Google translate in listening mode so I got a text translation of everything that was said. Also I started a Windows pc (with a speaker) and went to Google translate Web version. There everything I typed in English would be instantly translated to German and I could hit the speaker icon for the synthesised voice to read it in German. By controlling two mobile phones and a pc I actually got a pretty good user experience (for both sides of the calls I think). However I can type pretty fast so there wasn't much of a delay in responding. If I was implementing a voice translation service I would like to have an option to mute(or lower the volume a lot) of original speakers and hear only the translation. Unfortunately such voice conversations will always have higher delay than the text alternative(for fast typists).
yorwba 6y ago
It's also worth considering the alternative of people who speak different languages working together without translation. I found this article about the interaction of Chinese and Mongolian workers at a fluorspar mine particularly illuminating in that regard: https://madeinchinajournal.com/2021/01/25/the-double-tongued-dilemma-translating-chinese-workers-relations-in-mongolia/ https://madeinchinajournal.com/2021/01/25/the-double-tongued... Excerpt: Xu Jun, the crushing section lead, recalled: "Once I asked my Mongolian assistant to make a slanted connector for the ore crusher. I showed him many times the angle of slant with my gestures, but he just did not get it. Do you know what he gave me in return? A straight angle and a blank look. In the end I had to make one myself to show him what I meant. He instantly understood and raised his thumb, saying ‘Sain, sain’ [‘good, good’]. I didn’t know if I should laugh or cry." He blamed the incident on the Mongolian worker’s ‘inflexible brain’ rather than acknowledging a communication failure for which both were responsible. Such refusals to share responsibility were not uncommon among monolingual workers. Linguistic miscommunication without timely mediation easily perpetuates essentialist stereotypes. After the incident, Xu Jun would always ask a bilingual person to bridge the linguistic gap. Even though the translation may be imperfect as the intermediary might not know particular technical terms in Mongolian, their colloquial translation of the key actions involved could help the listeners understand.
- iso1631 6y ago
  > He blamed the incident on the Mongolian worker’s ‘inflexible brain’ rather than acknowledging a communication failure for which both were responsible Lol, it's like he works for the 1700s East India Company

iagovar 6y ago

I've only used text translation for articles and such, and the only translator that it's up there, from all I've tried (quite a lot), seems to be DeepL. I speak spanish, english, french and some Portuguese, and deepL is consistently better than others. That's not saying it's perfect. It still makes mistakes and uses weird wording sometimes, but it needs way less correction.

simias 6y ago
Agreed, deepl is pretty impressive, although its language selection is a lot smaller than, say, Google Translate. The usual caveats of automated translation apply though. "Take it" will be translated as "tomem-no" in Portuguese, "возьми его" in Russian and "prenez-le" in French, every time assuming that the "it" is masculine (or possibly neutral, in the Russian case). Depending on context that could be confusing if the "it" is feminine in the target language's grammar. There's also a bit of a mess with the conjugations. The Portuguese version uses "tomem", which is imperative plural (y'all take it), the french version uses "prenez" that's either imperative plural or formal/polite imperative singular, while the Russian version uses friendly/familiar imperative singular (thou, as English used to use) instead of the more polite and/or plural возьмите. Of course those are all valid translations for "take it" in English, but in a given context only one of them will be intended by the speaker. And those are all indo-european languages which share a common (if sometimes distant) heritage when it comes to grammar and social customs. If I spoke Japanese (which uses a complex system of honorifics) I'm sure I could come up with much more awkward translations. In Deepl's defense however it manages to piece it together if I give it more context, for instance "The box is on my desk. Please take it." is translated as "Коробка на моем столе. Пожалуйста, возьмите ее." where it uses the correct её for the (feminine) box, and the adding "please" made it switch to the polite form of брать. But of course in casual conversation through some online messaging application piecing together the context will be a lot harder in many cases. You have to deal with slang, incomplete sentence fragments, typos etc...
- ngcc_hk 6y ago
  Unfortunately just text no audio and no real time.

llarsson 6y ago

Turn on automated close captioning on youtube, and see how often it gets the speech wrong, even for English. Now imagine feeding that into a translation service. The output just barely manages to get the broadest meaning across. If even that. If it is also supposed to be real time and able to handle a conversation at a realistic pace... just forget it. This is just too be able to list it as a feature, it's not actually going to be good or work.

jhugo 6y ago

We've been testing realtime translation of realtime captions in real meetings lately, with a view to basically answering the same questions you're raising. Using Google's translation API, the number of mistakes is reasonably low, and it's absolutely possible to have a comfortable meeting even when technical topics are discussed, as long as participants are aware of the possibility of mistranslation and take care to avoid resulting miscommunication. It's far from perfect, but it's good enough with those caveats. We have plans to test out several others including DeepL.

Roark66 6y ago

Well, I'm not sure if my experience can be classed as "in work related context" as I didn't use the software at work, but people I communicated with were. Specifically, I know only few words in German, but I often buy stuff from companies in Germany. Most of those companies have an English speaking customer service, but this one huge Web shop didn't. They had an item in stock, I bought it... and then nothing. 1k EUR later days passed and there is no status updates nothing. I heard Skype has a translation service so I decided to try it by myself first. Unfortunately Skype's service is quite inconvenient to use with the other party not expecting it. Basically Skype implements the translation as a third (virtual) person on the call. That translator then simply repeats what it can hear in target language, but both parties can hear each other's original voice. This way to use an auto translator is very confusing for an unsuspecting person on the other end. So in the end I did something different. I set my android mobile with the phonecall on loudspeaker, used another android phone to open Google translate in listening mode so I got a text translation of everything that was said. Also I started a Windows pc (with a speaker) and went to Google translate Web version. There everything I typed in English would be instantly translated to German and I could hit the speaker icon for the synthesised voice to read it in German. By controlling two mobile phones and a pc I actually got a pretty good user experience (for both sides of the calls I think). However I can type pretty fast so there wasn't much of a delay in responding. If I was implementing a voice translation service I would like to have an option to mute(or lower the volume a lot) of original speakers and hear only the translation. Unfortunately such voice conversations will always have higher delay than the text alternative(for fast typists).

yorwba 6y ago

It's also worth considering the alternative of people who speak different languages working together without translation. I found this article about the interaction of Chinese and Mongolian workers at a fluorspar mine particularly illuminating in that regard: https://madeinchinajournal.com/2021/01/25/the-double-tongued-dilemma-translating-chinese-workers-relations-in-mongolia/ https://madeinchinajournal.com/2021/01/25/the-double-tongued... Excerpt: Xu Jun, the crushing section lead, recalled: "Once I asked my Mongolian assistant to make a slanted connector for the ore crusher. I showed him many times the angle of slant with my gestures, but he just did not get it. Do you know what he gave me in return? A straight angle and a blank look. In the end I had to make one myself to show him what I meant. He instantly understood and raised his thumb, saying ‘Sain, sain’ [‘good, good’]. I didn’t know if I should laugh or cry." He blamed the incident on the Mongolian worker’s ‘inflexible brain’ rather than acknowledging a communication failure for which both were responsible. Such refusals to share responsibility were not uncommon among monolingual workers. Linguistic miscommunication without timely mediation easily perpetuates essentialist stereotypes. After the incident, Xu Jun would always ask a bilingual person to bridge the linguistic gap. Even though the translation may be imperfect as the intermediary might not know particular technical terms in Mongolian, their colloquial translation of the key actions involved could help the listeners understand.

iso1631 6y ago
> He blamed the incident on the Mongolian worker’s ‘inflexible brain’ rather than acknowledging a communication failure for which both were responsible Lol, it's like he works for the 1700s East India Company