For quality translation of complex, non repetitive ideas, a human is, and will always be required.
I have been in the translation business field for about 20 years now, so I have seen the rise of desktop tools, then server-based solutions, and lastly, of course, cloud-based tools. While each generation is better than the previous, the increments are decreasing.
We are based in Canada, where we receive around 300,000 new immigrants per year. That's 6 million over those 20 years. Guess what? Those people are hitting the job market, and now, their children too.
Consequence: the overall quality of English texts is noticably decreasing, from ALL of our customers. I notice the names, and they are not your typical English, French, German, Italian or Ukrainian names (traditional settler groups in Canada). We do more and more of what is called "transcreation", a fancy way to say complete re-interpretation of a text. We basically extract the main ideas, and re-write the whole thing, because basing the translation on the provided source text always yield disappointing results.
I really don't see how machines could distill the ideas out of a text and reinterpret them in a nice way.
I can see AI work for short, simple, well-written texts. Heck, even long manuals with repetitive blocks of text from manual to manual. But with creative, complex text: still a looooong way baby!
I have been in the translation business field for about 20 years now, so I have seen the rise of desktop tools, then server-based solutions, and lastly, of course, cloud-based tools. While each generation is better than the previous, the increments are decreasing.
We are based in Canada, where we receive around 300,000 new immigrants per year. That's 6 million over those 20 years. Guess what? Those people are hitting the job market, and now, their children too.
Consequence: the overall quality of English texts is noticably decreasing, from ALL of our customers. I notice the names, and they are not your typical English, French, German, Italian or Ukrainian names (traditional settler groups in Canada). We do more and more of what is called "transcreation", a fancy way to say complete re-interpretation of a text. We basically extract the main ideas, and re-write the whole thing, because basing the translation on the provided source text always yield disappointing results.
I really don't see how machines could distill the ideas out of a text and reinterpret them in a nice way.
I can see AI work for short, simple, well-written texts. Heck, even long manuals with repetitive blocks of text from manual to manual. But with creative, complex text: still a looooong way baby!