World Translation Day was celebrated on September 30 with a variety of events, workshops and seminars. This time, one of the most discussed topics was, of course, the role of Artificial Intelligence in translation. Is it even worth learning how to translate when machines can do it in a fraction of the time that it takes humans to translate a text?
The simple answer is yes. That is because translation is more than just a mechanical replacement of one word or phrase into another language. There are many nuances that technology cannot capture, at least not just yet.
Some famous examples of mistranslation include the literal translation ‘eat your fingers off’ in Chinese, for ‘finger licking good’, the catchphrase of a famous fast food chain. Another was a multinational bank’s phrase ‘assume nothing’ which was translated into ‘do nothing’ in many countries, leading to major losses for the bank.
Context and tone matter equally in translation. The French ‘bon jour’ can be easily translated into ‘hello’. But it can be said in so many different ways. Change the tone, and the meaning can easily change, from humour to irony and more. The most consequential example of inaccurate translation from history is of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 in New Zealand. The English version used the term ‘sovereignty’ which the local Maoris translated into ‘governance’ as there was no concept of total control in their community. This led to decades of misunderstanding and misrule.
If humans can mistranslate, machines can do it more. This is because AI depends on pre-existing data, phrases and word combinations. It does not create finer nuances and subtle distinctions.
In diplomacy and commercial activities, finer details are sometimes more important than the broad strokes. In law, medicine and politics, one word can make all the difference.
This is true even in literature. Readers are often inclined towards work written in their mother tongue, mainly because other languages sound foreign and artificial. Imagine machines trying to re-create the magic of Rumi or Shakespeare.
Translators have a powerful role to play in society today as they negotiate multiple cultures. They are trained to decide when to be serious, when lyrical, and when humorous. It is doubtful that machines can evoke such timely emotions.
Of course, that does not mean that technology should be abandoned. AI has opened the doors of many cultures and civilisations. It has made data more easily and promptly available. Some mechanical work of translating routine documents has definitely become easier. But even those need to be verified by humans before they can be finalised.
As with everything in AI, the trick is to work along with it, not against it. Taking an initial translation as a first draft to work on it, giving it the nuance, context and cultural accuracy it requires, is a necessary and important task left to humans.
Translation plays a pivotal role in today’s global world. Even as technologies grow more fluent and complex, human skills and feel for the language remains central to a translation, one that machines may never be able to duplicate.
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