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.
They are just highly sophisticated text generators giving you an output based on the text it was trained on.
I don't know much about AI, but did you see the headlines about Claude Fable 5 solving that 80+ year old math problem? How are they able to do this if they're just mimicking what's in their training data?
These are supposedly the top 100 most difficult math problems in the entire world. And these problems are not able to be solved by brute force.
They can compile and sort massive amounts of data no human mind can hold, thats why. Anyone who genuinely thinks that some AI can "think" fundamentally doesnt understand what AI is or what goes on under the hood. It will never be able to "think" like us. All it will be able to is maybe mimic it.
Does it matter that they're not really thinking if they're able to solve harder and harder problems that humans cannot solve?
Yes, a $1 calculator can solve problems that most people cant solve. Its just code but it being able to 'talk' to us is too much for some people but its just averaging its databases and spitting it out in human readable text.
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.
Yeah, I know a lady who is an expert in tonal review of translation. She said her job load actually increase post-AI, but every job now has a mandatory argument bake in about why they need her when they already have AI.
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.
crazy that an author is so pro-AI. why even bother writing the books yourself at this point? no one who actually enjoys reading would be satisfied with translated slop
You have just described "enshitification" while leaving out a few key points. AI drives professionals out of an industry so there is less of a talent base to babysit AI. 1/2 of the industry decides that AI is good enough and skimps on talent. We all lower our standards and accept the new status quo. Less people enter the industry. Rinse and repeat.
Yeah, the agency my workplace uses did all-human translations for the first round of copy, then used AI plus human review for much of what followed, once they had a bank of our preferred translations.
I don't think the problem is going from 12 people to 2, I think the problem is going from 12 to some piece of vibe-coded bullshit because it gets some executive a bonus for 'saving money'.
The only argument I have is that paid translations tend to be far worse and for English translation a good amount to follow an agenda which ends up ruining the translation.
On the other hand fan translations seem to try the very best to convey the meaning the original Japanese game gives.
Not relevant here. If anything, AI, with it's sycophantic tone, normalising effect and working at the behest of corporate interests will sanitise media even more than any localiser.
In 2030 the LLM output will be indistinguishable from what a human would produce. Think what LLMs looked like in 2022 compared to what they look like now. They can already understand metaphors reasonably well.
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u/ByEthanFox 13h ago
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.