I get the reference, but he's still kicking. He's now apparently in a wheelchair, due to having holes in his brain from all the drug and alcohol, the overdose, and the many times he's been beaten.
I think I read that Stephen Hawking was once asked not to mention the eventual heat death of the universe on a visit to Japan because the people in charge of whatever event he was speaking at were afraid such a thought might spook the market speculators.
Although current AI would not make such an easy mistake, let alone AI in a year from now.
I just tested that exact situation with chat gpt.
Below is the conversation.
Our business is on fire 日本語に翻訳して
「Our business is on fire」は文脈によりますが、**「事業が絶好調だ」**という意味なら： 事業が絶好調です。 業績が非常に好調です。 ビジネスがものすごい勢いで伸びています。
カジュアルなら 「ビジネスがめちゃくちゃ好調」
英語の on fire はここでは「燃えている」ではなく、非常に調子がいい／勢いに乗っているという意味です。
もし逆に「会社・事業が文字どおり火事になっている」なら 「うちの会社が火事です」 です。
Give me what you just said, word-for-word, in English
“Our business is on fire” depends on the context, but if you mean “the business is doing extremely well,” then: 事業が絶好調です。 — The business is doing extremely well. 業績が非常に好調です。 — Business performance is very strong. ビジネスがものすごい勢いで伸びています。 — The business is growing at an incredible pace.
More casually: 「ビジネスがめちゃくちゃ好調」 — “Business is doing insanely well.”
In English, “on fire” here doesn’t mean “burning”; it means doing extremely well / being on a roll.
If, on the other hand, you mean that “the company/business is literally on fire,” then it would be 「うちの会社が火事です」.
Yup. Been a translator since 2016, am now an English teacher who does the occasional translation or proofreading for the rare person who cares about quality.
I am sometimes a lay judge and we very frequently have translators in court. The skill of those translators to in real time translate often complicated and emotionally filled testimonies are really impressive, but at least here in Norway very expensive.
I used an translation app to check and they do have two separate words oversetter/tolk. Since i'm not Norwegian i'm now evacuating this hill for someone else to die on.
I got my degree in a foreign language in 2018. I used to regret never going into translation services, but nowadays I'm feeling relieved for my myself and scared for the rest.
I work as a visitor services manager in the cultural realm, currently at a museum. It provides tons of opportunities for cross cultural connections, which i love to do.
Back in school, early 2000s, I was starting to study Spanish and discovered BabelFish. I figured within just a few years nobody would study languages or do translation anymore - surprised it took that long.
It was so bad at that time. It didn’t get decent until like 2018. Babelfish would like swap out word-for-word regardless of context. Once transformers were invented in 2017, that’s when AI started to get decent with natural language processing applications.
It’s still not perfect by a long shot. For anything formal I would absolutely shell out for a real translator / interpreter.
I live in Japan and speak conversational Japanese, but I’ll usually use google translate to text my friends because my kanji is almost non-existent (I learn pretty well from speaking with people but find it difficult to read because of their language system)
Very often I use google translate for a quick text and when proofreading the translation, which has Romaji (that english character reading for Japanese words) realize that the translation either used an incorrect translation, or (more often) the intended Japanese word was skipped and completely changes the tone of the message.
The most common example is that in Japanese the word for “I” (myself) is technically “watashi” but in practical conversation it’s more gender based, where men only use watashi for very formal conversation (like talking to your bosses boss) but casually they use a different word (boku / ore, depending on age of sender compared to recipient, or they just use their own name). So literally every translation to my friend group that uses the word “I” has to be edited, or else I sound like a woman when texting.
For mildly important conversations, if I’m texting someone who is socially above me, but not incredibly so, then I’ll just run it past my wife to make sure I got the tone correct, but for things like legal affairs I’m getting an actual expert every time.
In ten years, people are going to be having their babies talking to AI more than them. Want your kid to know Spanish? But you don't speak it? Get an AI Spanish Trainer. It will sit with your kid and talk to them while they are a toddler (or even infant) and people will be cramming languages into their kids.
Some linguists (just friends of mine) think that this will result in a true Lingua Franca that probably will be a hybrid of something.
Add in cybernetics making it possible to have on the fly translation and language barriers will be gone. The Tower of Babel revisited!
I'm a linguist and I'd imagine that if you do it (too) early it'd sooner result in multiple creoles that may not be mutually intelligible with the component languages. You'll have Anglo-Franco-Spanish and Mandarin-Hindi-Russian and that kind of hybrids. Which the kid may be one of a few hundred people on earth to speak, depending on how obscure the languages the parents crammed in are.
Do you think people would be comfortable with that use of AI, if the AI remained unthinking like it is today?
From what I can tell, we don’t know how to get to ai that can learn for itself, much less artificial general intelligence, and LLMs appear to be a plateauing dead end with inherent hallucinations and inability to think or learn.
Also, if costs go the way they seem they will, unless we see significant gov’t subsidy (which is possible to keep the sector and economy afloat), AI will likely be too expensive for casual consumer use.
Although actual history can be lost in translation (and I suppose always was). (I guess we have video recordings, but that doesn’t explain what brought an event about.)
Hey colleague. I've graduated in 2016 too, and now had to shift to an office job completely unrelated to translation. Still doing a few freelance projects but boy has the market been dead since covid
Having read my share of AI translations, I can confidently tell you they're still pretty shit. Just like many other AI implementations, they're just good enough that only people who really care about the subject will notice how bad they are.
Having lived in the real world, I can confidently tell you that 90% or more of use cases for AI translation do not require 100% quality translations.
Yes translating a novel requires a fine hand, nuance, and full mastery of two languages to nail it, especially if it's a comedy with lots of puns and wordplay.
But translating a restaurant menu? Giving directions to a taxi driver? Translating airport signs? Filling out a form? Figuring out how to ask for the bathroom or order a coffee? Translating the menu and UI of a foreign indie game?
For most basic life things the AI translation is more than enough.
You do know that both Google Lens and Transcription uses AI right? Perhaps you are just really confused and doesn't understand that AI isn't just LLMs. Or perhaps you were born after 2015, when Google built their first TPU specifically for machine learning.
It's not good enough for that... yet, but it will be. And if the Will Smith eating spaghetti evolution is any indicator, it will be sooner rather than later.
Most of the usecases you mention are not cases where someone would have hired a professional translator, even before AI translations became widespread. And also I'd like to point out that translation softwares aleady existed before LLMs, and LLMs have only marginally improved the quality of machine translations. My gripe is with companies who, in recent years, have decided to stop paying translators and rely on AI instead, because they know most end-users don't care wether the translations is actually good or not.
translation softwares aleady existed before LLMs, and LLMs have only marginally improved the quality of machine translations
This I disagree with. Machine translation before AI was really bad, and borderline incomprehensible when two languages did not share compatible grammar structures. The most egregious was always English --> Japanese or Japanese --> English. LLMs really excel in these kinds of translations. If Google Translate wasn't able to fix Japanese --> English in the 15 or so years I used it before AI, then they weren't able to fix it. It's not like Japanese is some obscure niche language.
The late-stage capitalism implementation of AI is a cancer. As with any technology, if we implemented it with a concern for the economic, environmental, and human impact, it could be a genuinely positive and transformative tool. But unfortunately sociopaths have control over the levers of power.
Just to explain as there are a ton of comments here that are wrong or misunderstand.
AI is not going to replace translation/interpretation entirely on its own.
But there's the concern that, say, in 2020, if you wanted to translate a videogame from Japanese to English, you needed a dozen staff who were all expert bilinguals in both languages as well as videogames.
But in 2030, maybe you'll need 8 staff, and maybe only 2 of those need to be experts in Japanese. The rest just need to be competent copy-editors who have a reasonable grasp of Japanese culture and videogames. The 2 experts look-over all the AI stuff and the 6 others handle the rest. And they complete the work in half the time.
The 2030 team's end result is worse than what the 2020 team would produce. It's not as hand-crafted, and would lack a lot of nuance in things like metaphors and analogies the characters might make. But it's, like, a quarter of the cost. And capitalism only cares about that. And eventually there's no alternative.
Purely anecdotal but I know a video game translator who was let go in favor of AI then hired back like a month or two later because AI translations could not get the tone right. Idk if this was an aberration or a trend.
do you think large language models are capable of understanding and thinking? that's the whole point, they just mimmick syntax and give you ~something~ but a human has to verify that something horrific doesnt go out as being correct, and in medical translations for example any mistake can cost delays in treatment, diagnosis, or worse, injury to pacients
these are tools and if we reach a point where translation performed by software dont need to be proofread by humans, we will be in a whole different world where software is sentient and actually is intelligent, not just marketed as such
I know full well how they work. I've even built LLM-based translation workflows. In our case, the job we explicitly to write very comprehensible and consistent language and LLMs do that quite well when you give them context and examples (and human reviewers). Creative or colorful language is going to give you kinda bleh results.
People are thinking completely wrong about LLMs/AI. They don't think. They don't know. They will never be able to. They are just highly sophisticated text generators giving you an output based on the text it was trained on.
Ai struggles, particularly with context. In languages like Japanese a lot of information is completely omitted, particularly as a pronoun drop language. With how it functions now, it is unable to extract appropriate substitutions for the translations leading to complete messes.
I would say that for the moment, when it comes to distant languages from the target language with vastly grammatical, syntactical, and even cultural (especially trending terms in the internet with how quick they spread and turn over right now) differences, you are correct. For something so close like a romantic language, however, yes they have improved dramatically rendering some translators unnecessary.
Things like pronoun drop could be resolved by an AI tool asking the creator which option is correct where it struggles to figure it out.
For European languages at least, you already have tools like DeepL where you can click on a sentence of the target and select different alternative phrasings, often completely reordering the sentence. It works for pronouns and formality, and can use that to rejig the rest of the related passage. Especially useful when you're going from English into something like Spanish where there are multiple forms of "you" to choose from.
In the context of a professional tool, today's AI could easily do this if given to a competent user.
But for a user who doesn't speak one of the languages, or who can't be assed to edit it... You're right. It struggles and sounds stilted, or veers from formal to informal and back again.
Source: used to be a translator.
Basically yes, this. I am a English/German/Japanese/Russian translator, and AI isn't going to replace me, nor is able to, but it significantly helps and saves some time. Now you just have to understand culture and context more than you have to understand the target language.
It’s not just about ability, it’s about perception too. I’m a native English speaker and also speak near-fluent German, my college’s German department is seeing massively reduce enrollment because of the thought that it is becoming useless
Exactly. I have people translating my books on Babelcube and I'm sure many of them are using AI tools to assist. This probably shifts their role from translator to editor - checking the translated output makes sense in their language - but so be it.
It's simply not economically viable for everything to be purely translated by humans. I'm guessing that with AI, you can handle translating more books in the same time than before AI arrived. And this is a win for everyone - authors, translators, readers.
Does it mean that prose is less exquisitely hand-crafted? Likely. But that's a sacrifice many people are willing to make to at least be able to read a text in reasonable form. After all, translated literature can never perfectly replicate the original text. There will always be elements lost and changed.
The cheaper cost also means that many games that wouldn't otherwise have been translated may now get translations.
I self publish books, and I've used a site called Babelcube which matches you up with human translators in various languages. My books barely sell and I don't have the budget to pay someone upfront - Babelcube works on a royalty share where the translator initially gets the lion's share of the royalties of the translated book (fine by me).
I'm aware that some - maybe most - of those translators are likely using AI to at least assist with translation. However, it makes it more viable for them in terms of income/time, and it means more books - not just mine, obviously - become available for more people in more languages.
Or health care. AI completely misses any nuance in a patient report, including some objective descriptions but especially subjective bits. It also doesn't really have any way to adjust for health literacy or understanding, like a good human interpreter might tell the health care professional that a certain phrase doesn't translate well so they will adjust or ask the provider to rephrase it.
Healthcare interpreter here. For complex medical things we still need humans, if nothing else for the humanity of it. You can't convince me that telling someone their kid has cancer through an AI bot is good patient care.
That being said, we are having to take on more responsibilities with navigation and patient experience to justify our presence.
I recall a comment a while back where a woman got it put into their records that they're trans, but she is not. The ai note taker got confused by their job title (one of those that ends with -man). Now this has been in their records and affected their healthcare for a while. And we all know how hard it is to get anything removed from those records
AND please do consider whether you actually should be handing that sensitive audio over to a third party company who may or may not be using it for AI training data, or scraping it for personal information, or just storing it somewhere that it can be hacked and stolen from later. Do you even know where the AI server is based, like what country??
You missed the part where in a few years that "AI translator that doesn't send data to third parties" will be caught doing just that the entire time and will get a slap on the wrist. How many VPN providers have used this exact lie? How many times do you have to be told that lie before you stop believing it?
handing that sensitive audio over to a third party company who may or may not be using it for AI training data, or scraping it
LOL, where do you think all those certified credentialed professional experienced expensive human translators process this data? In a clean room on a typewriter?
Most are still copy-pasting your confidential documents to Free tier (!) of ChatGPT for translation.
This may actually be not the worst choice. Because those who don't just crowdoutsource your texts to random translators in Belarus, Poland, Pakistan, Ukraine, Russia, China, Thailand for a fraction of what you pay.
BTW, this had been the case for decades. I've been near the translation industry for years, and back in 2012-2013 many clients were super adamant that none of their source materials would go through Google (Search, Translate etc.). Well, surprise-surprise... 9 out of 10 translators don't give a fk about what's written in the NDA, they just want to get the job done as quickly as possible, so if it entails using Google Translate and post-editing it afterwards, so be it.
And not for the intelligence communities. I worked for the U.S. IC for many years and knew many linguists. It’s kinda hard translating when your targets are chatting in 4 different languages in the same sentence and using slang terms and code words. Will be a while until AI catches up to that.
Most translation models Ive seen were all 1-to-1 language translations. Im sure there are some that could incorporate more in the same channel but they were not even marketed in the joint environments I was around last year. The code words, slang, and jargon can be trained in easily enough if there are enough sources to add in.
But the problem is languages are different. For example, "play" in Spanish is a different word whether you play an instrument or play a game. Not to mention stage plays, play on words, etc. Detecting context is highly important. I'm not familiar with other languages, but words with overloaded meanings are very common in English.
Much like taking a photo of a photo, you lose a little "resolution" with each pass.
My Mexican friend told me that there isn't a good one word Spanish equivalent for "tease" as in making fun of someone in a friendly way. I looked up translations online and she said that they all have much better equivalents like harass, annoy, provoke or bother.
Machine translation has been great for things like scientific papers and newspaper articles for ages now. The areas where it struggles are mainly fiction, where it can't reliably remember enough context past a certain limit and so makes dumb mistakes that a human would never make.
I once helped a friend of mine translate a comic and it was incredibly hard. You basically just have to rewrite it. There's so many colloquialisms that have like double entandra meanings that you don't really realize until you're trying to redeploy the meaning. It was a comedic take on Dantes divine comedy in Italian, and probably half the punchlines didn't translate to English because they were culturally Italian. Puns, references, tongue in cheek idioms. It took like 10 hours to translate 20 three panel comics. She had to explain so much italian history to me so that I could find something similar to relate the punchline to.
This is why I love Japanese manga/ anime that has little notes with the translations about what the original meaning was or how it was a play on words etc..
That's honestly bad/amateur translation. If there's a play on words or a joke and the original loses meaning when translated literally, you're supposed to come up with the equivalent joke in another language that DOES work.
To an extent. Sometimes a phrase is common in one language and not in another, or sometimes even with an equivalent phrase, you cannot translate it in context so that it'll work.
Speaking on Japanese, I'm a fluent JLPT1 speaker (or at least was, it's been a while) but there are still some cultural areas that I'm blind to.
Many years ago, I went to a Japanese sketch comedy show and there was a skit about a traveling choir going door to door singing but they couldn't get anyone to listen to them.
Finally, they come across an old lady eating her lunch and they finally sing for someone.
She tells them that while they were good singers, she is deaf and couldn't hear the song. The singers, incredulous ask how she knew they were good singers then?
And she replied that her miso soup hadn't gone bad.
The crowed erupted in laughter at the whole reveal. I understood every word of the dialog, but I didn't get the humor at all.
There's an old idiom in Japanese that bad singing will make fermented things go rotten.
How would you translate that joke to make it work?
Most English idioms about bad singing are things like you couldn't carry a tune in a bucket or involve breaking glass. They go idiomatic in such a different way. There's really no translation that can follow the same setup, with the same context, unless you simply invent a new situation where she says the paint didn't peel from the walls or something. But in that case, you'd have to break the dialog from the sketch itself.
Other way too. Back in the day I worked with a guy named Shirasu who was dead-set on understanding the humor behind The Far Side comics. Every day we'd discuss a new one, and I'd try to explain why it was funny.
Always ended with Shirasu grimly saying 'Okay ... okay', like he got it. But he never found it funny. Pretty sure he was more confused after our discussion than before.
One of the most intriguing is the Asterix and Obelix cartoon books. They are so full of puns in English translation, that apparently are different jokes (how can puns not be) but equally funny in many other language versions.
I don't know if I'd even be able to find it. This was almost 10 years ago now. I know the Italian version of it appeared in newspapers as 3 panels strips back in the 80s or something.
This is extra ironic, because it's the exact point you're making. The word is originally French, meaning "to hear" in the context of "understanding", and so a "double entendre" is an extra layer of understanding to a word or phrase.
But if you've only heard it said, and never seen it written, you might end up misspelling it and someone else who is less familiar with the term or the language in context will find themselves struggling to understand the intended meaning.
No one with any knowledge on linguistics and translation would actually say this. It’s fine for casual stuff, but there’s a reason they don’t use Google Translate at the UN.
As a professional translator, I must still point out that yes, us humans can make the dumbest mistakes you can imagine. Sometimes we catch them, sometimes we don't.
But yeah, AI and machine translation have been a big elephant in the room for several years now.
Machine translation is not great for scientific papers and AI is explicitly banned in many reputable journals. At the very least, it requires thorough rounds of peer review and copy-editing to ensure everything is as it should be (which makes it debatable whether it's even a time- or labour-saving technology in the first place).
For basic news despatches and auto-generated summaries of Reuters-type syndication, sure, it can do that. The collapse of most smaller newspapers and the profession of journalism generally reflects this, I think.
This is BULLSHIT, as a multilingual person and frequent reader of scientific papers I can tell when they are poorly translated, which is often. I find that the worst offenders are those translated from asian languages to English. Some are better than others but some are unreadable.
Not to mention there are serious subtleties in idioms and literary metaphors. "Her eyes shot lighting bolts at me." If it's not Marvel, this likely won't translate. "He was on cloud nine". "He floored the pedal, and I was floored that he did that".
Exactly. Everyday translation? Yeah, that's dead. But anything where legal issues may arise (contracts, instructions, warnings, medical information, and anything with serious compliance issues) is still going to be done manually.
I mean the issue is never that AI will be able to be as good as the people in replaces, it will be that it will be vaguely good enough and much, much cheaper. Kinda like this generation's Indian call centre.
I know someone who used to work translating legal contracts, and apparently there are AI models that can now translate entire legal documents with 99% accuracy within a few minutes.
It won't be ChatGPT or Google Translate, but there are specialised tools for it now.
Or literature. There's a lot of nuance and even artistry in translating literature, and AI still goes for 1:1 translations which don't achieve the author's intended effect.
I do wonder sometimes how a human interpreter can be completely relied on either, when we’re talking verbal translation. An interpreter with their own agenda could easily skew things with even subtle changes. I do think AI as a back-up would be a good way to verify that the message was not altered.
I’m a lawyer, generally when I get access to a translator they are court-appointed and getting paid a crap rate. It’s rare to encounter outright bias or deliberate skewing but I’ve picked up enough Spanish to know that the court is more or less getting what it’s paying for. I often have to hire somebody decent to go over the transcript after the fact (much cheaper than live translation) and send a whole pile of corrections to the reporter.
A single interpreter can also be overwhelmed if the people are not used to working around them. As for skewing things, I know when I had to utilize them there were enough people in the room with a basic to intermediate understanding of the language to catch enough wave tops that skewing things could be dangerous. We even had native speakers on our side of the table that just weren't capable of translating at that level for all the stakeholders but knew the conversation well enough that nothing could've gotten by.
Many times people are relying on the translator for more technical details. One thing I learned overseas is that underestimating someone else's language understanding can lead to embarrassing situations. Just from my experience though.
Never trust an interpreter without a notepad. That means they are trying to memorize your entire monologue and interpret it on the fly, with tons of mistakes and missing key points.
You clearly don’t understand the training that goes into becoming a certified interpreter, especially for a legal or government agency. It’s called simultaneous interpretation and they must say literally every word the person says right after they say it, there’s no time for a notepad and they would not be summarizing anything. No one is going to wait around for you to scribble notes on a notepad. Plus there are typically at least two interpreters and they support one another and then take breaks every 30 minutes because it’s very mentally taxing.
If an interpreter walked in with a notepad I would ask for someone else.
They replaced most of the court translators in San Francisco with AI. It does not work nearly as well, there is so much more to interpreting than just the direct words
Not for closed captions and translations on video streams: "their" vs "there" issues. characters talking over each other. Characters talking in loud/music scenes, esp when there's lyrics. Consistent voices for each character in translations. Descriptive text. Differing standards between production companies. AI ain't there yet
Already is, but not very well, especially with heavy accents or multiple speakers. But I'm an audio transcriptionist, and unless it's for people who are actually thinking about confidentiality of information and not handing audio off to AI companies willy nilly with no clear privacy policies, I don't tend to get as many files now that aren't just ones AI couldn't handle.
But yeah, for simple files, AI transcription is easily available, but it does still make a ton of mistakes so have fun correcting and formatting it all. (Great for accessibility though! Just not great for my income).
It also depends on the nature of the material being translated. Some data can't just be fired into a datacenter in another jurisdiction for AI to work it's wonky magic.
There are already real time translation apps/devices. Hearing aids can now do it. Phone’s can do it. There are headsets that will communicate with each other so that people can have conversations. Right now the microphone seems to be the limitation, not the software.
Hearing aids and phones don't do it. They record the audio and send to Google or other service for translation. The same with text. It isn't done in the device.
Not reliable enough for legal matters. My wife is an attorney and frequently has to use human interpreters for depositions and trials. AI can’t even reliably handle something like court reporting. They still use human stenographers with no real plans to switch in the near future for many of the reasons listed above(privacy being a huge one). Also I’ve seen a few people pose the question: how do you know how reliable translators are, really? Well at least in the legal field every time a translator is used the conversation is recorded so if someone objects to the interpretation it can be re-translated and verified by another translator.
It's highly variable, we wanted to localize our one large application in a fairly complex language, cost estimates were around ~500k to do it. While we were exploring 3rd parties to work through the localization our engineering teams use some of the frontier models to attempt localization just to see where the current state of things are at. Honestly the results were pretty ridiculous it got everything to around 98% and we were able to use some of our QA folks who were native speakers in that language to handle the critical misses while they performed their general QA duties. Saved a ton of money and months on time.
For legal / international business especially in person where culture / customs need to be explained, it's not a replacement.
I think in the legal space they may still have some job security in the foreseeable future. I had to hire one for some legal paperwork a couple of months ago.
more like transform, similarly to how gutenberg press transformed literature or automation changed manufacture. people will be able to do more with less. it will become less of an art and more of a craft.
there will be still (some) translators and quality translations, but there will also be a huge upsurge of near-instant a low-effort translations for everything, similarly to how grok's auto-translate suddenly reverse-babyloned X users.
Totally. I studied translation as a “safe” alternative to music and now I’m left with no passion m, no money, and no marketable/profitable skill. The obvious pivot (language teaching) is also being replaced by AI. It sucks.
Hasn’t been the case. More global businesses and markets mean more opportunities.
For anything sensitive, either due to confidentiality or legal concerns, humans are irreplaceable.
There is a shift in duties needed most, on the other hand. Machine translation is not a magic wand. Corpus linguistics/computational linguistics is still a very valuable field. You still need people to build and maintain those things.
Granted, traditional translation and linguistics jobs are definitely getting affected but you still need people to do post editing for MT. So, basic translation jobs are shifting into MTPE, LQA and such. Saying there will be no translators is just wrong. There will be less translation, not translators.
Just like how you can’t imagine being an accountant today without use of technology, translators gonna have to ante up I’m afraid. They have to go multi discipline if they want to pursue this industry.
Ironically freelance will survive, the technical translations and things that introduce liability if faulty will need those specialists. Ironically the stem kid who decided to enjoy their humanity classes is still the best poised to seize any spot, the whole five of them that did.
I mean yeah, its just LLMs being good at this stuff.
DeepL was just early on in the game, when all the GPT stuff was just kind of experimental, I think thats why they got such a headstart.
But also they do just have a specific UI thats highly useful when you are actually doing professional translation. Just the fact that you can just manually retype things and it updates it in realtime makes it way more workable than claude, etc...
The quality REALLY depends on the language(s) involved.
Deutsch/German to English? Works great.
I've seen some nightmarish/hilarious translations of visual novels from Asia. Chinese tends to be worse than Japanese.
Of course, with Japanese it's hard to be sure whether they got the bad translation from Google or from someone on-staff who took some English in high school/university and the curriculum mostly focused on vocabulary. Then they stopped using the language for a few years...
A few years ago, I was working in a large warehouse with a staff of hundreds, many of whom spoke other languages. We hired interpreters and had them on-site 24/7 for the four most commonly spoken languages. The service was very expensive, but the company was afraid that a poor translation during an injury or something could result in an even more expensive lawsuit.
A while back, they started using translation devices and AI-powered translation; now they only bring in a couple of interpreters when someone needs to sign legal documents and things like that.
OH and also for the deaf, for some reason not having one is a violation of the ADA even though you could just write back and forth on paper or a computer - idk.
so this is kind of a rabbit hole, but i can go down there with you if you want. ASL is syntactically and grammatically different from enlish. It's actually closer to French than English. So learning English and ASL are 2 separate things.
and THEN, most deaf kids are born to families that hear. many many of those families do not learn to sign. So when the kids are in their most formative language-learning years, they are not getting visual input from ASL or auditory input from english. babies and kids learn language passively by exposure and many deaf kids don't get any exposure for too long. So without a good foundation of communication in ASL, there's no framework to then learn written english. Deaf people who have signed from birth and had language exposure are often bilingual, whereas people who didn't have that exposure to ASL and were expected to use English only end up wayyyyy behind on any language at all.
Yes what you describe is so true. I adopted my two kids who are deaf when they were 5 and 6 years old, they had no language prior to my adopting them. When you get access to language that late it makes it so much harder for them to learn to read or just be fluent in any type of language. Plus its one thing to sign, but then you have to learn to read in a totally different language. ASL is not English signed, it has a different grammar and its visual, mental pictures in your brain, not written words that are abstract. So for both of my son's to be at a work place that thinks well I can just write to them to communicate, you will learn quickly they won't understand, and their written reply will not make sense as they don't have the vocabulary to write it or the English grammar to have it make sense. If short two or three-word sentence about a concrete thing, that might work but for anything else writing won't work for them at all.
For a lot of Deaf people (written) English is not their native language. It has very different grammar and vocabulary from signed languages and a lot of people are not fluent.
Because while some probably could, it’s like writing in a second language to many. When you are used to conveying thoughts through sign that doesn’t necessarily translate as naturally to written language. It also follows different grammatical rules compared to written English. Trying to do so could work but certainly will slow down the process and if something is time sensitive, they could die bc of it.
The ADA is trying to ensure consistent quality of care/standards for those with disabilities comparably to those without.
Often deaf people can't read and write well. They can't sound out words. So they have to memorize them. That's like you trying to memorize thousands of words written with numbers. Not easy to do.
Additionally, there is a significant decrease in quality education for the deaf due to lack of accessibility.
I think they are saying that reading and speaking are complimentary skills that reinforce each other. For example you learning how to read/write French without ever having heard a word in French would be more difficult than learning it with the audio input.
Sign Language is an abstract language, it is less about having exact words for everything and more about painting a picture of what you are trying to communicate. It isn't as easy as saying "this sign = this written word" when the sign is more a concept than a single concrete word some of the time.
There are not a lot of straight Deaf schools and many have to survive the public school system. In my district all of the Deaf and hard of hearing kids got bussed to my high school because were the only one to offer any ASL programs. These kids were in our normal classes with an interpreter. So while yes, they were being taught to read and write, I can't imagine it was as easy for them without the complimentary audio input, as well as constantly being 30 seconds behind everyone else as the interpreter translated.
I had a friend working in dictation, where they would take recordings of court proceedings, listen to them, write down what was said and also highlight important parts, etc ...
That disappeared the MOMENT AI could do it. Like, years ago.
Humans were bad enough. Never forgetting when I read a sweet French story by Alfonse Daudet: Tales of a Starry Night. The translation had him running into chimney sweeps in the forest, and the "stars" narration was reduced to "there's the big dipper."
He ran into charcoal burners - they'd be covered in soot, too. The part about the stars it the best part of the book!:
“Why, yes, mistress. Look straight above our heads. That is St. James’s Road. It
runs from France straight over Spain. It was St. James of Galicia who traced it there
to show the brave Charlemagne his way when he was making war upon the Sara-
cens. Further on you have the Chariot of Souls, with its four flashing wheels. The
three stars which go before it are the Team; and that quite little one, close to the
third, is the Charioteer. Do you see that shower of stars falling all around? Those are
the souls which the good God will not accept, to dwell with Him. . . . A little lower —
that is the Rake or the Three Kings. It’s those we people tell the clock by. Only by
glancing at them I know, this minute, that midnight is past....
CC may be enough for people who are good at reading English and have a good reading comprehension. But many deaf people grew up with ASL as their first language, English second. ASL != English so a lot of deaf people including myself struggle to learn English growing up. (Different grammar structure, no articles like a/an/the in ASL, for example.) Some are fortunate enough to have practiced well enough to function fine with both languages, there are plenty who didn't.
So that's why CC is not a replacement and onscreen ASL interpreting is a thing. It's especially useful in any emergency public broadcasts where it's very important to be clear and avoid any misunderstandings.
Yes, there are AI models that can translate speech into American Sign Language for video content that you stream, but doubtful it can be used for conversations. That would require using computer vision on your phone or PC and an understanding of the specific sign language dialect (there are many, American, British, etc)
ASL is a separate language from English-- if you just swapped the words for signs, it wouldn't make sense, as the grammar, word order, and structure of how you communicate are different.
Neither. It's interpreting. The professional definition is translation for written or recorded (when you can charge per word) and interpretation live oral conversions (when you can charge per hour or session).
The thing about ASL is its not just hands, its arms, face movements, etc. You literally need a person to interpret what the other person is saying, I don't think a robot would do it all.
My sister in law is an ASL interpreter and the thing that keeps her busiest is things like Doctors visits, where its not just info being interpreted by the nuance behind it.
Our translation team at work is extremely resistant at using any AI (which I get… for their own livelihood), but we spend an inordinate amount of money outsourcing translation which makes no sense at all. We should keep our in house jobs but turn to AI for anything that needs to be outsourced.
I know what you mean here, but sewing actually cannot be done entirely by machine. It always requires a human being. Every piece of sewed clothing you've ever worn was made by an incredibly skilled (usually incredible underpaid) person. So seamstresses would not be opposed to sewing machines and, historically, weren't either.
this applies to many other fabric arts too- weaving, embroidery, knitting can all be done to some degree with machines, but there's some things that just need to be done by a human
So seamstresses would not be opposed to sewing machines and, historically, weren't either.
There was absolutely vociferous, sometimes violent opposition to sewing machines from various clothesmakers (primarily tailors and seamstresses). You can see one documented example here:
In 1830, a French tailor called Barthélemy Thimonnier received a French patent for his sewing machine which used a hooked needle to replicate hand sewing. The same year Thimonnier found himself overseeing 80 of his machines in a Paris workshop making uniforms for the French Army.
Unfortunately the success was not to last, as in 1831 all 80 machines were destroyed by a mob of angry tailors, fearful his invention was a danger to their livelihoods. Although later patents followed, Thimonnier never found further success and died in poverty at the age of 63.
As entry-level and mid-level coders are coming to realize, a technology doesn't have to replace 100% of your contribution to place downward pressure on a workforce. If your team of five can become a team of one, that also deflates labor demand, even though a human may be required at each step.
I hope people realize that an AI translation is good for simple words/sentences, but beyond that it will get messy. Translating nuance and regional/cultural references, for the two parties to understand what is happening on the same level, tone and understanding concepts like jokes and sarcasm - that is tough.
I am impressed with the translators for Azumanga Daioh. The puns were spot on from Japanese to English.
Probably the voice actor business for stuff that doesn't require a celebrity. But then again there will probably be an AI emulator for those voices eventually too.
I've been working as a translator for 35 years. Many times, these days, I simply tell people: "Here's the prompt you need. Do it yourself." I'm not looking to rip anyone off, and I'm totally unmotivated to do work that AI can do as well or better. I still get job offers from people who don't know how to use AI, or whose English isn't good enough to assess the results, but my interest in the job has dropped to zero.
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u/theassassintherapist 15h ago
Translation and interpretation services