Are Artificial Intelligence Translators Taking Jobs Away From Human Linguists?

Can AI Translation Programs replace human translators? This is a hot topic heatedly debated in the translation industry nowadays. Erik Cambria is an academic researcher and assistant professor at NanYang Technological University in Singapore. He focuses on natural language processing, which is at the heart of AI translation. Like Dr Magiford, he sees the complexities of translation and the associated risks of machine translation. "When we read an article, we automatically do a lot of things," he said. Reading requires a combination of related factors to achieve the effect of comprehension, which has not been taken into account by machine translation in the past. The biggest problem with machine translation is that it tends to enter the syntactic form of the statement first and then convert it into the syntactic form of the target language. This is not what we human linguists do. We first decode the meaning of the statement and then encode that meaning into the target language. In addition, there are cultural risks involved in machine translation. Dr. Ramesh Srinivasan, director of the digital culture lab at the university of California, Los Angeles, said new technological tools sometimes reflect the subjective consciousness of the people who created them. "There are two parameters that determine how we design smart systems. One is values, or you could say the ideas of those who create systems. The second is the real world, which can also be programmed into the machine. "If you build an ai system that is heavily influenced by the subjective consciousness of the designer, then you may encounter translation failure at some point. Dr. Srinivasan said translation tools should make people aware of their translation capabilities and limitations. "How can a single system be so easy to unify two languages that are so different semantically and syntactically for the general public to understand?" he said. It is essentially a wrong concept to integrate different languages into the translation machine, isn't it? But from another Angle, Mary Cochran, co-founder of Launching Labs Marketing, sees the commercial advantages of automatic translation. She noted that online markets like Amazon can use automated translations and optimize the language for buyers in other countries. "I believe we are using a very small percentage of what AI can do in terms of marketing," she said. "With better translation and more global communication, AI will make the commercial market more prosperous. From a technologist's perspective, AI faces difficulties in replacing translation; But from a linguistics teacher's point of view, even if one-day technology can do it, it cannot replace language learning. Talene Boodaghians, a multilingual teacher with a master's degree in applied linguistics and second language from Oxford University, has her own take on the recent spate of claims that, with translation machines, students can "learn culture, not language".