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I made a career switch from translation (JP > EN) into tech in 2022, and since ChatGPT was released very shortly after I made that decision I feel I got lucky w
by autumnstwilight 2y ago
I made a career switch from translation (JP > EN) into tech in 2022, and since ChatGPT was released very shortly after I made that decision I feel I got lucky with the timing. Many, many jobs are now "machine translation post-editing", which means you spend almost as much time manually checking and re-translating, but get paid significantly less.
Machine translation certainly has improved a lot, but still has the usual AI issues- namely that the AI confabulates details in places where a human translator would realize that something is unclear and refer to context, other parts of the text or external research for clarification. A common example in Japanese to English is that Japanese often omits pronouns, while the English version of the sentence requires "he"/"she"/"me"/"you" to be grammatical. A human translator can check this, but AI will often autofill whatever is the most common in its dataset, which could be completely wrong in context. So I think the risk with machine translation is that it can seem reliable and trustworthy 90+% of the time, but if you have no ability to read the original text and compare, you're rather quickly going to get caught out by something that looks like a professional, clean, correct translation, but is a total misrepresentation of what was actually said.
- gedy 2y agoI imagine Japanese is probably the "last mile" for machine translation given the nuance compared to other languages.
- minebreaker 2y agoIMHO those people who claim that the AI translation is perfect are only using it between Indo-European languages.
- postepowanieadm 2y ago... and don't proofread AI generated translations.
- re-thc 2y agoThere are nuances in many languages. Japanese isn’t the only 1. It’s not just the language itself but the culture. Same words can be used differently or have different meaning.
- autumnstwilight 2y agoYeah, the "explaining the difference between 'butt dial' and 'booty call'" problem. Another thing I notice is that, if a translator is not familiar with how people in a certain culture interact, and what words they use in different situations, they can end up doing things like translating something as a polite, gentle explanation when it's clearly a mocking, condescending one. The literal meaning of the words is there, but they haven't picked up on the tone. Even English does this- "I beg your pardon", "With all due respect" and "As per my last email" are frequently (but not exclusively) hostile even though the literal words are formal/polite. This is also hard for AI to deal with.
- az09mugen 2y agoI don't know any other language where you have so many rules for politeness : https://8020japanese.com/politeness-levels/ https://8020japanese.com/politeness-levels/ It is cultural indeed, but it has impact on the language. Can you cite me another language with so many rules for politeness ?
- hippari2 2y agoYeah but only because it's probably the only foreign language left with large fanbase of popular media, and thus a good number of critics for bad translation.