Poll: Do you think most translation will be done completely by artificial intelligence in coming years? Thread poster: ProZ.com Staff
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This forum topic is for the discussion of the poll question "Do you think most translation will be done completely by artificial intelligence in coming years?".
This poll was originally submitted by Seyit Ali Dastan. View the poll results »
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It depends on what is meant by “in the coming years”. In the near future, I don’t think so, but I’m not good at predicting things…
[Edited at 2018-10-19 09:09 GMT]
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I've been following AI as a possible substitute for translation for decades.They are very different processes.
The US intelligence community used to translate all the documents that interested them. Over the years their demand has gone up by many orders of magnitude, and they are using AI to scan for what interests them. But most of the material would never be seen by a translator anyway.
To put it another way, the material being scanned by AI is not fodder that transla... See more I've been following AI as a possible substitute for translation for decades.They are very different processes.
The US intelligence community used to translate all the documents that interested them. Over the years their demand has gone up by many orders of magnitude, and they are using AI to scan for what interests them. But most of the material would never be seen by a translator anyway.
To put it another way, the material being scanned by AI is not fodder that translators are missing out on.
There is no substitute for a translation done by an intelligent human being, and there never will be. ▲ Collapse
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Artificial intelligence is not yet invented, even though the term is used for some current technology. Intelligence means being able to cope with completely new situations, and this is exactly what no machine can do today. What we have today are impressive simulations and imitations of intelligent behavior, but these work only with known patterns of some sort (even complex patterns, admittedly), and all of them fail when they get a task they are not trained for. They are able to do repetitious w... See more Artificial intelligence is not yet invented, even though the term is used for some current technology. Intelligence means being able to cope with completely new situations, and this is exactly what no machine can do today. What we have today are impressive simulations and imitations of intelligent behavior, but these work only with known patterns of some sort (even complex patterns, admittedly), and all of them fail when they get a task they are not trained for. They are able to do repetitious work and therefore they will take over these "trainable" tasks in translation as well, but since nearly every translation task has some unknown component in it, they will not be able to take over translation completely.
Artificial intelligence in its true sense will probably be invented at some point in the future. But this is a purely economic question. Human intelligence is still abundantly available for reasonable cost, so why bother? ▲ Collapse
| | | | | Possibly in terms of volume | Oct 19, 2018 |
Machines will probably take over most of the repetitive and predictable short-term communications, where elegant style is not vital, and the odd mixed inflection or misplaced comma does not alter the meaning too seriously. That may in practice mean a very large proportion of the material translated.
Where style, absolute accuracy and correct grammar are important, trained humans will still be needed. But sometimes humans are not a lot better than machines, I am afraid! - I am just l... See more Machines will probably take over most of the repetitive and predictable short-term communications, where elegant style is not vital, and the odd mixed inflection or misplaced comma does not alter the meaning too seriously. That may in practice mean a very large proportion of the material translated.
Where style, absolute accuracy and correct grammar are important, trained humans will still be needed. But sometimes humans are not a lot better than machines, I am afraid! - I am just labouring through a text I agreed to edit for a good client, full of Swedish legalese syntax simply reproduced in English. 
Humans may have to get their act together if they want to compete, but then there will certainly be some areas, possibly the most interesting, where real understanding is needed. ▲ Collapse
| | | | EvaVer (X) 
Local time: 05:24
Czech to French
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| Yes, and also... | Oct 19, 2018 |
Christine Andersen wrote: Machines will probably take over most of the repetitive and predictable short-term communications, where elegant style is not vital, and the odd mixed inflection or misplaced comma does not alter the meaning too seriously. That may in practice mean a very large proportion of the material translated. Where style, absolute accuracy and correct grammar are important, trained humans will still be needed. But sometimes humans are not a lot better than machines, I am afraid! - I am just labouring through a text I agreed to edit for a good client, full of Swedish legalese syntax simply reproduced in English. Humans may have to get their act together if they want to compete, but then there will certainly be some areas, possibly the most interesting, where real understanding is needed.
... depends in what language pairs. Developing a really good translation algorithm for a "small" pair may be not worth the while.
| | | | | AI and Machine Learning | Oct 19, 2018 |
Well, AI need a lot of way to make translation for us but machine learning may change it. Currently machine learning can detect faces through pictures and I'm sure it can make better translation if it can be taught correctly.
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| AI will always be a few steps behind... | Oct 19, 2018 |
I attended a very interesting workshop recently on machine translation. The university academics were quite enthusiastic, but even they did not envisage machines taking over all translation. Machines have trouble with idioms and irony among other things. They may be able to distinguish when a face is laughing or crying, but they have very few clues as to whether a written text should be taken at face value or not. What works in one language does not necessarily work in another…
A... See more I attended a very interesting workshop recently on machine translation. The university academics were quite enthusiastic, but even they did not envisage machines taking over all translation. Machines have trouble with idioms and irony among other things. They may be able to distinguish when a face is laughing or crying, but they have very few clues as to whether a written text should be taken at face value or not. What works in one language does not necessarily work in another…
As EvaVer says, there are also problems with 'small' language pairs. Hebrew was mentioned as just one example of a language where there are not always sufficient volumes of material to train a machine. There is also the problem of quality - greater volumes are not necessarily an advantage if they include a lot of variants and non-standard language.
Pre-editing was not mentioned much, apart from a basic selection of subject areas.
The users of translation from the 'real world' - translators and agencies who are running MT projects - were more cautious. They were still waiting for the quality of machine translation to rise to a level where it could be used beyond 'internal communications' and for selecting which texts to spend human effort on.
Whatever happens, human language changes and evolves, and it is very unlikely that AI can predict how. If AI develops language along its own patterns, there is no knowing whether they will coincide with the way humans think and speak, and how humans will understand the results! ▲ Collapse
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"Do you think most content will be done completely by artificial intelligence in coming years?"...
| | | | Mario Freitas
Brazil
Local time: 00:24
Member (2014)
English to Portuguese
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Machines are already replacing Chinglish and peanuts translators. They are the ones to be scared. The rest of us will die and leave work for our children. The fact that the Chinese use machine translation and issue documents/manuals, and sell their products with this type of quality does not mean the rest of the world will to the same. There will always be a market that values quality and a market that values only profit. If you are part of the former, you don't fear MT.
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