As anyone who has tried pointing their phone’s camera at a menu in a foreign country lately will know, machine translation has improved rapidly since the first days of Google Translate. The utility of AI-powered translation in situations like this is unquestionable – but the proposed use of AI in literary translation has been significantly more controversial.
The use of AI translation for commercial fiction has outraged both authors and translators – despite attempts to reassure them with promises that no books will be translated in this way without careful checking and that authors will have to give consent. Translators and authors have also pointed out that AI translation requires very careful checking and editing – ideally by someone who knows both languages. At that point, that person may as well be translating the text themselves. Cultural sensitivity is a particular concern, as AI has been known to produce things that are wildly inappropriate.
There are however some scenarios in which machine translation could arguably help the creators of cultural works. For writers working in minority languages, for instance, whose works are not currently translated into English or other languages at all, an AI-assisted translation could bring them to the attention of many more readers. And in video games, localisation can be one of the bigger costs for smaller independent developers, especially those for whom English is not a native language. AI translation of in-game text could theoretically help those developers reach a much larger audience, and help players who speak minority languages to enjoy their games more. But here, too, there are obvious limitations.
Dr Jack Ratcliffe is the designer and CEO of Noun Town, a mixed-reality language learning game, speaking to the locals in one of 40 supported languages. Noun Town has around 50,000 lines of dialogue, all of it translated and voice acted by humans, and checked by language teachers. The studio did experiment with AI translation and found that when they used it with languages other than English the results were significantly worse. “What we’ve found in our tests that going into English is actually OK, though nothing with AI is ever perfect,” he says. “These large language models have learned a lot of English but going into other languages, especially less popular languages, it gets more and more out there, more and more confused.”
Any game developer making a game with lots of words and dialogue, then, is looking at a high localisation cost – and presumably cares about the meaning and nuance of those words as much as the author of a book. When it comes to how people feel about AI translation, there is a definite distinction between utility and craft. Few object to using AI in the same way as a dictionary, to discern meaning. But translators, of course, do much more than that.
(Adapted from https://www.theguardian.com/)
