It’s a widespread opinion that machine translation is a cost-saving and effective solution for translating between languages. Software is incredibly popular nowadays, indeed. For example, only Google Translate is used by 227M people monthly. Does that mean that professional translation services are not needed anymore and human translators disappear soon? Let’s find an answer.
How Machine Translation Works?
The process of automated translation starts by examining the structural makeup of each word or phrasal element in the source language. Then a machine analyses them and synthesizes them into the target language. The problem with this method is that it can affect the general quality of translation because languages have different structures and the majority of machine translators fail to recognize this. It means that outcomes produced by automated tools are not quite reliable.
The situation is even worse when there’s a need to translate speech. The task appears to be more complicated because of the two-step process: 1) proper recognition of an oral message and then 2) rendering it to the target language. That’s where the results produced by automated speaking translators leave much to be desired. So, that’s the field where manual transcription and translation services providers will be in demand for a long time so far.
Translations in Vital Situations
Sometimes having a translation app available on a smartphone can result in saving a life. For example, your car won’t go and you are in some northern country in winter. The only way to not end up freezing at night is to convince some driver of a passing car who speaks another language to help you. That’s where an automated tool can be useful, but again - only to some extent. That’s because speech recognition is still a weak point of machine translators, especially with background noise (remember, you are on a windy road amidst a severe northern winter). And typing with freezing fingers is not the best solution.
Let’s look at some more situations. I’m short of breath and have luckily found a doctor who only speaks Russian. Or I’m in a courtroom in Moscow trying to protect myself against a lawsuit. The last thing I want is automated software shooting out awkward sentences that are only distantly related to what I’m saying.
Behind the scenes of a doctor saving an immigrant’s life, you have a certified medical interpreter well-versed in both language and medicine who was crucial in bringing about that result. Behind the scenes of a court case with a foreigner, you get certified legal interpreters who have worked tirelessly throughout the case. Importantly, these people are fluent in both Legalese and at least two languages - English and Russian.
Sometimes, accurate interpreting can mean the difference between life and death. That’s when professional Russian-to-English transcription services are needed.
Industry Expertise
Anyone has to go through training to become a certified interpreter/translator. There are theories and techniques you have to learn, such as note-taking if you’re doing consecutive interpreting. Every interpreter puts hundreds of hours of work into perfecting their craft, reviewing terminology in their field of expertise, and making sure that they stay at the top of their game regarding industry developments.
Behind multinational conferences, you have a team of a dozen skilled interpreters who spent the past eight hours simultaneously interpreting between two languages. They do interpreting in fields such as metaphysics, psychotherapy, or space navigation for the benefit of everyone in the room.
But as long as there are languages, there will be a need for specialists who can accurately navigate between them. Even when people don’t realize it.
Cultural Differences
Further, people have cultural awareness which machine translations don’t provide. A number of my friends are bilingual in Russian - English. When they are asked to interpret between English and Russian they all face the same problem - the cultural gap between the two languages. Much of their effort as translators is filling this gap between the speaker and listener. Some things that can be said in Russian are not translated into English. And the reverse is true as well.
Language Intricacies
Machines excel at limited and simple language like in business correspondence or weather reports. However, for rendering content with some hidden connotations, there is still a need for a human translator.
Words transmit ideas and feelings. Capturing them can be tricky even for humans, but is a real challenge for machines especially. I.e. metaphor is a big challenge for machines as they lack emotional life and experience upon which the metaphor can ‘work’.
Example. We often refer to a ‘warm’ person as someone loving and compassionate compared to a ‘cold’ one. The suggestion that a warmer person (in temperature) would be any more compassionate than someone with a lower body temperature is nonsense. We’ve crafted this metaphor from the warm embrace of our mother and her love for us as children, making us equate warmth with love.
AI comes across one of these newly created metaphors - it will have no option but to take it literally and thus make an error in translation. And because language is a continuously evolving thing with newly-created metaphors springing up every day, AI is always a bit late to the party. Just like a foreigner who doesn’t speak a language that well doesn’t get a metaphor and takes it literally.
Creativity
Indeed, machines are not creative beings. They are not capable of imagining things a programmer has not put into their systems. Humans can.
It means that robots fall short when dealing with texts that have artistic merits like a poem or a novel where there is a lot of ambiguity.
That is especially true for translating lyrics. The thing is that while versing poets not only use metaphors and other stylistic figures and literary tropes. They can also arrange words unusually - using conversions - to produce a certain emotional effect. These are only a few to mention.
What is more, can you imagine a machine that can both convey the intended meaning accurately and produce rhymed and rhythmed sentences simultaneously? Me either. So, to translate poetry, for example, to Russian, you’ll end up booking professional Russian translation services, choosing companies with a talented poet on their staff.
So, robots won’t replace translators of literature in the foreseeable future because of the artistic aspects.
Conclusion
Summing up, most people only need translation to understand an overall idea. They don't need to go into the particulars, and a gist is enough. Machine translation is good for a quick-and-dirty peek. Human translation for everything else.
For non-real-time translation, AI is ready to replace a significant amount of human labor but their work needs to be checked and improved upon by expert humans. So, computers will absorb the scut work as the best humans only have their jobs made easier.
Simply put, automated tools would make the job of translating for speed and formality faster when it is needed. Nevertheless, the presence of machine tools does not mean that human specialists will become jobless soon. Foreign language skills will be in demand for decades to come, indeed. The world of language is so extensive and translating and interpreting is such an arduous job, so we will still need professional translators to fulfill the tasks machines cannot perform so far.
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