While workers worldwide ponder how artificial intelligence might affect their livelihoods, there’s one sector where that question is no longer hypothetical. Machine translation has reduced the amount of work available to human translators and interpreters, and depressed their earnings.
This is an unfortunate issue since I think stuff like machine translation is incredibly useful as an individual, but the better it gets the less need there is for human translators for commissioned projects. At least it’s still really obvious when machine translation is used without thorough editing, so high quality translation still requires humans. A lot of foreign games and other stuff that isn’t super high budget don’t really seem to care about quality and consider the AI “good enough” though :/
Another concern I have with machine translation getting better is it discouraging people from learning foreign languages since they can just rely on AI to translate it for them.
Microslop’s own tools and documentation struggle to produce high-quality translations in places. They translate shit like keywords and function names in their docs.
Example: The German version of the T-SQL documentation for REPLACE literally translates the name of the function in the header: ERSETZEN. At least it’s a verb describing the activity, unlike the page for the UPDATE statement which translates it into a noun (AKTUALISIERUNG) rather than the verb (AKTUALISIEREN). Bonus: the description for the arguments also proceeds to translate some keywords. Go ahead and see if you can spot them, you don’t even need to be particularly familiar with SQL or German.
It’s a prime example of the computer following instructions without understanding the context, but since the instructions are poorly given and the output never checked, it produces uncritically published slop.
I do, but more importantly there are translation earbuds and stuff, and people can also just use their phone with paired wireless earbuds. Sometimes people already move to another country and don’t really bother learning the language because they can sort of get by. I imagine the number of people who do that would increase if they can just rely on their phone or earbuds to accurately translate everything for them (more so with a phone and paired earbuds since it can then both listen and speak for you).
Also, I imagine a number of people learn English and largely just use it to read or listen to stuff on the internet. If they can just automatically translate it without issues like missing phrases and other errors, then they might not learn it, which could in turn harm e.g. their employment prospects if they move abroad. This could apply to other languages too, but English is basically the default language on the internet so it’s an obvious example.
When I started reading British books in their original language, instead of the professional translations, they got about 10× funnier. And that’s despite only having B1-B2 reading comprehension. Translations can never capture all of the connotations of a word or phrase.
Your point about learning English might very well be true though. There is a high correlation amongst EU countries, between the average English level of adult citizens, and whether or not popular movies get dubbed or only get subtitles.
YouTube introduced that horrible mandatory auto-dubbing recently. At some point, that might become viable, and that will probably severely impact language acquisition.
This is an unfortunate issue since I think stuff like machine translation is incredibly useful as an individual, but the better it gets the less need there is for human translators for commissioned projects. At least it’s still really obvious when machine translation is used without thorough editing, so high quality translation still requires humans. A lot of foreign games and other stuff that isn’t super high budget don’t really seem to care about quality and consider the AI “good enough” though :/
Another concern I have with machine translation getting better is it discouraging people from learning foreign languages since they can just rely on AI to translate it for them.
Microslop’s own tools and documentation struggle to produce high-quality translations in places. They translate shit like keywords and function names in their docs.
Example: The German version of the T-SQL documentation for
REPLACEliterally translates the name of the function in the header: ERSETZEN. At least it’s a verb describing the activity, unlike the page for theUPDATEstatement which translates it into a noun (AKTUALISIERUNG) rather than the verb (AKTUALISIEREN). Bonus: the description for the arguments also proceeds to translate some keywords. Go ahead and see if you can spot them, you don’t even need to be particularly familiar with SQL or German.It’s a prime example of the computer following instructions without understanding the context, but since the instructions are poorly given and the output never checked, it produces uncritically published slop.
Microslop.
Maschine Translation only really works for written text. I don’t know anyone who wanted to learn a language to read written text
I do, but more importantly there are translation earbuds and stuff, and people can also just use their phone with paired wireless earbuds. Sometimes people already move to another country and don’t really bother learning the language because they can sort of get by. I imagine the number of people who do that would increase if they can just rely on their phone or earbuds to accurately translate everything for them (more so with a phone and paired earbuds since it can then both listen and speak for you).
Also, I imagine a number of people learn English and largely just use it to read or listen to stuff on the internet. If they can just automatically translate it without issues like missing phrases and other errors, then they might not learn it, which could in turn harm e.g. their employment prospects if they move abroad. This could apply to other languages too, but English is basically the default language on the internet so it’s an obvious example.
They are missing out.
When I started reading British books in their original language, instead of the professional translations, they got about 10× funnier. And that’s despite only having B1-B2 reading comprehension. Translations can never capture all of the connotations of a word or phrase.
Your point about learning English might very well be true though. There is a high correlation amongst EU countries, between the average English level of adult citizens, and whether or not popular movies get dubbed or only get subtitles.
YouTube introduced that horrible mandatory auto-dubbing recently. At some point, that might become viable, and that will probably severely impact language acquisition.