With the recent discussion around AI translation of anime (relevant post), it reminded me of this article/interview I read a little while back in which the topic was brought up with actual, professional translators.
If the topic interests you, check out the full article; it’s great. It has lots more info and analysis that what I have put below. I simply picked out a quote from each of the professional translators they spoke to. The full article has much more and great analysis by the author as well.
Zack Davisson (professional translator):
I would say that, like it or not, AI is coming. That genie is not going back in the bottle. And it is improving. The days of Google Translate being a joke are gone. Who knows what AI translation will be like ten years from now? Twenty? Something people need to think about. Hating it is not going to make it go away.
Matthias Hirsh (professional translator):
Machine translations (MT) nearly always need to be proofread or edited by a human, so in many cases, you might as well have hired a human translator. Additionally, having to compete with AI and MT devalues our work. Rates are stagnant among translation agencies as it is. More importantly, however, MT is cutting corners and ultimately leaves the end user with a worse outcome than they would have with a qualified human translator.
Kim Morrissy (professional translator):
Corporations should definitely be more aware of the current limitations of MTL/AI and not see them as a shortcut to reducing labour costs. It’s not just purely a matter of ethics but making people aware that current applications will either see a big drop in quality or require more human labour than they were led to believe. As for the consumers, I don’t necessarily think they should be expected to vote with their wallets purely over this issue, and it would be naive to expect them to do so, honestly. In the future, as AI improves, we may see the debate take on new forms. Personally, I like being optimistic about technological progress. I welcome the tech, just not the way business culture works around it. People have to argue for their rights as workers, otherwise those rights will get eroded over time. That’s just unfortunately how the world works.
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The first and last of your quote is the reason I often comments on the subject.
Spreading lies on the subject like “it’s stealing”, “it’s garbage” is just making everyone loose time and not discuss solution that we can push together to politics, like workers protections.The translators have some additional things to say about corporate behavior in this regard:
(Morrissy) In practice, machine translation and AI are used as ways to devalue the work of human translators. A lot of companies are in a race to the bottom to turn the role of “translator” into “machine translation editor”, which always pays much worse. It’s tough because the tech genuinely is useful in speeding up the process, when used intelligently. But at the moment, let’s just say that the suits really overestimate the contributions of the machines when a “machine translation editor” often needs to retranslate entire sections to ensure basic quality.
(Hirsh) The only reason agencies and companies want to use AI is to save money. And even if someone is hired to check (or redo) the AI’s work, that person will not be offered the same rate as if they were translating it themselves and they will not be given the time to do a thorough job. I can tell you from experience checking MT work (which I no longer do) that I never had enough time to fix everything to my standard of quality, between the time I was given and rate I was offered. They want you to work as fast as possible so long as the result is okay enough to not raise eyebrows or be incomprehensible to end users. Mediocrity is the norm.
There is also a recognition that this technology, if given time to develop, has potential:
(Davisson) Technology has replaced many careers across time. “Computer” used to be a profession where people did calculations all day. Now, the word refers to a machine. Many don’t realize “computer” was ever a job title. I can imagine “translator” becoming the same in the future. If AI continues to improve, I can foresee a time when “translator” is only a device in the Star Trek sense, and not a person.
The days of Google Translate being a joke are gone
Is it? Sure it’s gotten way better, but it still spews out a lot of garbage. With languages that are barely related like Japanese to English even more so. DeepL is better, but not that much.
Yeah, it’s better, but still far from great. I use DeepL quite a bit to try to make sense of Comic Natalie when keeping an eye out for news that this community would be interested in. However, if I didn’t already have a basic knowledge of kanji/kana and trusted the translations blindly, I would be hard pressed to understand half of any news item.
Yea, and even if the translation is pretty accurate, the actual grammar and sentence structure is awful. An LLM might be able to fix that somewhat, but then you’d have to hope it understands what the ML translation says.
At least ML translators shouldn’t purposefully miss translate to push some agenda…
I hear this quite a lot, but I feel like people are making it seem more of a problem than it actually is. Sure, it happens, but it’s not that widespread right?
Also, I don’t see how MTL would solve this. I would assume that CR approves the stuff put out by real translators, so what’s stopping them from requesting similar changes?
I don’t think I’ve ever seen it happen at all with a professional translation, and only very rarely with amateur ones. I’ve seen pro translators screw up, self-censor, or get censored by management that are fearful of lawsuits, but none of those represent an agenda beyond making money. Messing up the translation deliberately is a good way for the translator to not get paid and/or not get more gigs. I won’t say that it never happens, but I doubt it’s more than once in ten years.
Some fans are too sensitive to perceived “agendas” and too quick to allocate blame, methinks.
(As for MTL, it isn’t there yet. Maybe in another decade or two. And as you say, the management layer that’s terrified of lawsuits isn’t going anywhere.)
So far it reportedly at least happened in
- Inu ni Nattara Suki na Hito ni Hirowareta
- Osananajimi wo Onnanoko ni Shiteshimatta Hanashi
- Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Gou
- Prison School
- Kaguya-sama wa Kokurasetai
- Kobayashi-san Chi no Maid Dragon
- Hajimete no Gal
- Bokutachi wa Benkyou ga Dekinai
- Kono yo no Hate de Koi wo Utau Shoujo YU-NO
- Kawaiikereba Hentai demo Suki ni Natte Kuremasu ka?
Probably many more, those were just the ones I could find articles about
I mostly agree. I have seen it happen once or twice, but that’s it. It’s not good obviously, but it’s not as if the industry is overrun by it. Not even close.
