Hello, reader. I wish you well. How are you doing today? Quite frankly, the way things are going for me right now, I would do well to remember to ask MYSELF that very question multiple times a day. You see, I am a professional translator, and translation is nothing short of my life, as it has been for the past twelve years, but at this time I just know I’m on the verge of the biggest personal change in my life since my adolescence, all because of the alleged curse in disguise that is machine translation. But there’s no point in me rabbiting on about how “scary” it is when I don’t even have any memories of (presumably) being afraid of the dark as a baby.
If you go on the websites ProZ, or TranslatorsCafe, or LinkedIn today you can be sure of finding vast amounts of blogs and forum discussion material pertaining to machine translation. I know I’ve contributed to it; here’s one sample. https://www.facebook.com/GeorgeTrailTranslator/posts/2435373809886009?__tn__=K-R I certainly know what a “luddite” is, and what drives their resentment and concern, and I say that because some argue that machine translators are a threat to the employment of human ones like me. I’m caught in the middle, able to accept that they allow one to get things done more quickly, and that machines aren’t affected by tiredness or hunger or disease or other things the way humans are. And they don’t feel things, like impatience or jealousy, or having a chip on their shoulder. Some indeed favour machine translators: there are plenty of translation agencies today which offer Machine Translation Post Editing (MTPE) services, and I say that as a language professional who recently did a project for someone in which I was asked to evaluate machine translation output. It was probably inevitable that I would sometimes be fascinated (although no less often amused) by some of the things I read there.
Meanwhile, other translation agencies overtly state that they forbid their translators from using machine translation outright (surprise surprise), while some even state in their terms and conditions that for a professional translator to use Google Translate in work for them would amount to a violation of confidentiality terms since there will be confidential information stored in a server somewhere.
Maybe you’re wondering if I agree that machine translation is only improving as some claim. I say that it is. Google Translate even translates “Schadenfreude” now. However, it still doesn’t explain why “I should of” is wrong, for example. Another thing that is undeniable is the vast non-uniformity of a given language from speaker to speaker, and how languages are subject to change over the years just as humans themselves change. Have you ever seen the Lord’s Prayer in Old English?
But language is supposed to be a tool invented by people for people. And if you think habits like picking your nose are bad, I’d say that people all too often, subconsciously, look to develop what deserves to be labelled as habits by the word’s dictionary definition to make the work they do “easier” and simplify their decisions in general – for better or worse, while easily becoming irritated and agitated if expected to act differently. I’d be lying if I said I’ve never fallen into that trap, but I have survived and even thrived as a self-employed translator all the same. I’ve had my share of moments where translating something was not exactly “hard” as much as hard to render coherently where I have actually understood it easily enough – I’m just trying to avoid writing it in a – dare I say it? – natural way whereby the output wouldn’t look as if it was composed by a machine.
Have we really got autonomous AI now, as if to suggest that a machine won’t necessarily learn and remember only what someone wants it to learn and remember (the volume, however huge and/or complex, is irrelevant here), while never even forgetting anything or ending up confused? Cyborgs are still fictional, right?
Myself, I have enjoyed being verbally creative where necessary to make a translation of something work (while still retaining the right register and everything). And automated thinking is really only programmed habitual thinking in its own right – remember what I said about habits earlier. I once invented a game “Come Across Or Made Up?” in which I put forth a list of bad yet comprehensible bad translations with the objective being to guess whether they were ones I actually came across somewhere or ones I made up, made to look just like ones I came across somewhere. Sound like fun?
Even if machine translators are still clearly far from perfect in some respects, maybe my days as a professional translator really are numbered. After all, even if a digital machine makes a mistake, you would expect that it would be possible to trace the cause of it within its programming employing some standard approach. It’s not that easy that humans, with their different mindsets and their differences in thinking and perception brought on by their own personal experiences. It’s one thing that machines make our lives easier and more comfortable, but I certainly wouldn’t want to see human translators go extinct because the human race would rather turn to a machine than healthy imagination (especially their own) for insight…