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Google’s New Service Translates Languages Almost as Well as Humans Can
Thread poster: Jeff Whittaker
Ilan Rubin (X)
Ilan Rubin (X)  Identity Verified
Russian Federation
Local time: 15:48
Russian to English
Yes but... Sep 28, 2016

Preston Decker wrote:

"The meeting stressed that the draft documents should be put into practice after being approved by the plenary session. The comrades of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the CPC should take the lead in in-depth study and profound comprehending and take the lead in stricter demands on themselves in accordance with the documents. We must adhere to the party's basic line, resolutely safeguard the authority of the Party Central Committee, strictly observe the party's political discipline, and maintain the party's relations with the masses of the people. Flesh-and-blood ties, upholding the principle of democratic centralism, maintaining a clean and honest political nature, and consciously accepting inner-party supervision and supervision by the masses of the people. "



Grammar mistakes aside, isn't that just how people of a certain political persuasion talk?


 
RobinB
RobinB  Identity Verified
United States
Local time: 07:48
German to English
MT for legal and financial texts Sep 28, 2016

Annamaria Amik wrote: Some fields of translation are probably more threatened by MT, but I don't think any client would risk using MT for legal or financial texts.


It's certainly being used for discovery purposes, in the same way that automated systems are rapidly taking over significant elements of the (monolingual) discovery process, which is already starting to put large numbers of law graduates and even lawyers out of a job. Expect that trend to continue to the point where a majority of people with law degrees (at least in countries like the USA and the UK) will not find legal work. The number of people studying law is then likely to drop dramatically.

MT is being used in a similar fashion to pinpoint texts that will then have to be translated by humans (though not "manually", of course) because they have the potential to influence the outcome of the litigation.

In the financial field, automated systems are already in use to generate financial newsflow in e.g. English, which is then translated automatically into other languages. Again, this sort of technology is making inroads into previously human-only jobs.

Human translators will continue to enjoy excellent professional prospects, provided they can add value compared with the machines. But that makes them no different to a large number of other professions where automation ("the robots") is making rapid advances.


 
Markus Nystrom
Markus Nystrom  Identity Verified
United States
Local time: 07:48
Swedish to English
+ ...
AI hedge Sep 28, 2016

With the caveat that I'm not an investment advisor, let me offer this:

In its most rudimentary form, putting on an AI hedge would involve human translators buying shares in Alphabet, or any other company heavily invested in machine learning and business process automation--a good proxy for which might be the QQQ trust, for Americans at least. Please offer alternative proxies if you know of them, as I'm no tech expert. That way, should the fears of personal obsolescence motivating th
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With the caveat that I'm not an investment advisor, let me offer this:

In its most rudimentary form, putting on an AI hedge would involve human translators buying shares in Alphabet, or any other company heavily invested in machine learning and business process automation--a good proxy for which might be the QQQ trust, for Americans at least. Please offer alternative proxies if you know of them, as I'm no tech expert. That way, should the fears of personal obsolescence motivating the hedge come to pass, the share price appreciation will do something in the way of offsetting the human translator's declining prospects and market value. Over the course of several business cycles, a successful investment in emergent technologies has the ability to create substantial wealth. Of course, one must weather volatility in the interim, not only in share price, but in the buffets to one's personal fortunes that might induce one to make a poorly timed sale. Something an artificial intelligence, even when operating within our constraints, might not succumb to, incidentally. The AI hedge strategy presupposes that the investor pursuing it is currently generating investable income in the profession he or she fears being displaced from. Unfortunately, this may mean that those most susceptible to early displacement will be the least advantageously positioned to provide against it.

But there are other hedges in life. There is nothing in our destiny or in our genomes saying that the only marketable skill we are allowed in this life is translation, or whatever trade's hat we happen to be wearing, to extend the logic. The fact that we are capable of mastering the complexity of two or more languages at a level allowing us to derive a living from those skills is (probably) indicative of a latent ability to master wholly other sets of complexity and to thrive in the process. Unfortunately the manifest ability to do one thing well, and the potential to do many others just as well, is not always paired with the will, or the time, or the appetite to branch out into new areas and take the risks along the way. But that should not stop us from laying plans against the day we may or shall be displaced.
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Arianne Farah
Arianne Farah  Identity Verified
Canada
Local time: 08:48
Member (2008)
English to French
Seems to have more to do with cherry picking source sentences Sep 28, 2016

The articles are all interpretations of the news related to the actual research paper. The last sentence of the paper's abstract is "Using a human side-by-side evaluation on a set of isolated simple sentences, it reduces translation errors by an average of 60% compared to Google's phrase-based production system."

The system achieves results in "isolated simple sentences". We're still a far cry from anything that would cut into translator's tasks. In my mind, until AI comes up with a
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The articles are all interpretations of the news related to the actual research paper. The last sentence of the paper's abstract is "Using a human side-by-side evaluation on a set of isolated simple sentences, it reduces translation errors by an average of 60% compared to Google's phrase-based production system."

The system achieves results in "isolated simple sentences". We're still a far cry from anything that would cut into translator's tasks. In my mind, until AI comes up with an effective spell-checker (one that doesn't need human intervention to 'accept' or 'ignore'), we're still a long way from effective translation (ie. if you can't get one language right...)
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Fiona Grace Peterson
Fiona Grace Peterson  Identity Verified
Italy
Local time: 13:48
Italian to English
Long way off yet Sep 28, 2016

This part struck me particularly, in the article I read this morning:

"Google says that with certain languages, its new system—dubbed Google Neural Machine Translation, or GNMT—reduces errors by 60 percent."

With certain languages? What about the others?
And 60 percent? What about the other 40?

I'm not going to start worrying just yet...
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This part struck me particularly, in the article I read this morning:

"Google says that with certain languages, its new system—dubbed Google Neural Machine Translation, or GNMT—reduces errors by 60 percent."

With certain languages? What about the others?
And 60 percent? What about the other 40?

I'm not going to start worrying just yet


https://www.wired.com/2016/09/google-claims-ai-breakthrough-machine-translation/

[Edited at 2016-09-28 14:51 GMT]
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Daryo
Daryo
United Kingdom
Local time: 12:48
Serbian to English
+ ...
couldn't say it better! Oct 2, 2016

Kay-Viktor Stegemann wrote:

The point where translators really will get in trouble will be the point when software some day should be able to understand human language. This cannot be achieved by algorithms, not even the most sophisticated ones. This could only be achieved by systems that are able to learn entirely new things. To this day, there is no such thing as artificial intelligence, the only things we have are sort of "intelligence simulators", "learning simulators", and complex systems that can look very smart in very narrowly defined environments. MT today does not even attempt to understand language, MT just analyses language in order to increase the chance to hit the right translation, and while it might succeed in increasing this chance, the difference to 100% will stay very significant, therefore any text that requires accuracy cannot be machine-translated. With this approach, MT results will always clearly show that the person who presents us with such a text does not care for quality. Of course there is a market for this, as well as there is a market for even the worst product if it is just cheap enough.

To this day, no software was able to master the Turing test. As long as this does not happen, MT will be exactly what it is today: one particular reason why the world needs competent human translators.


with one small addition - with a different approach quality translation by some kind of Artificial Intelligence will eventually be achieved, but when that happens most of the humanity will be redundant, not only translators... No point worrying about that NOW.

What is more worrying today is the level of marketing BS (not only about MT) that is distorting the general public's perception of what is translating!


 
Peter Holozan
Peter Holozan
Slovenia
Local time: 13:48
Interesting comment on Google claims Oct 3, 2016

Here is an interesting comment on Google claims about improvement:
http://kv-emptypages.blogspot.si/2016/09/the-google-neural-machine-translation.html

And the articles went even beyond the claims in the Google paper: the paper said that in some sentences they approached human translation quality.


 
Cristiana Coblis
Cristiana Coblis  Identity Verified
Romania
Local time: 14:48
Member (2004)
English to Romanian
+ ...
The singularity Oct 3, 2016

Daryo wrote:

with a different approach quality translation by some kind of Artificial Intelligence will eventually be achieved, but when that happens most of the humanity will be redundant, not only translators... No point worrying about that NOW.

What is more worrying today is the level of marketing BS (not only about MT) that is distorting the general public's perception of what is translating!


Like it or not, the singularity will happen in our lifetimes. If predictions are correct, most of us will be close to retirement by then. If we are lucky.

I agree with most that AI input is needed to produce significant improvements. I am sure you have already seen this article on some of the surprising progresses of AI (in this case DeepMind, also an Alphabet company): http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-computer-beat-the-go-master/

I recommend watching the video if you haven't already. Conclusions (around 6:11) fully apply to human translators.


 
Oksana Weiss
Oksana Weiss  Identity Verified
Germany
Local time: 13:48
Member (2011)
German to English
+ ...
Others too Oct 3, 2016

Annamaria Amik wrote:
Some fields of translation are probably more threatened by MT, but I don't think any client would risk using MT for legal or financial texts.

Medical, marketing and technical fields are also safe. And what about translating the articles for newspapers? And the entire books, for that matter?


 
Tom in London
Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 12:48
Member (2008)
Italian to English
Please share Oct 3, 2016

Annamaria Amik wrote:

.....
A few weeks ago I saw some turkey legs in a Romanian Lidl supermarket that were described as "Turkish legs" (i.e. using the country name Turkey) in Hungarian. The word for turkey should have been 'pulyka', so it's not even close phonetically to what they printed. I had to stop to laugh and take a photo.....


Please share the photograph!


 
Merab Dekano
Merab Dekano  Identity Verified
Spain
Member (2014)
English to Spanish
+ ...
Questions Oct 3, 2016

LegalTransform wrote:

... but at what point are customers willing to overlook awkward phrasing and the occasional mistranslation when they are saving thousands of dollars and can get instant translations without the need to wait. A lot of translation work only survives today because it is in a non machine-readable format (pdf, etc.).

Sample translations in Spanish, French and Chinese to English: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4-Ig7UAZe3BSUYweVo3eVhNY3c/view

[Edited at 2016-09-28 00:01 GMT]


Q1: Will you let the machine do your website?

Q2: If you were a Company CEO, would you hand over a machine translated manual to your employees and thereby risk being laughed at?

Q3: What about a commercial leaflet? Would you risk losing your customers?

It’s that simple: while translation output is for humans, it will have to be done by humans.


 
Tom in London
Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 12:48
Member (2008)
Italian to English
Happy? Oct 4, 2016

Q4: if your Greek surgeon hasn't done a craniotomy before and needs to read up on it, but needs it translated from English into Greek would you be happy for him to just use Google Translate?

Q5: if your Japanese wife/husband files for divorce and claims ownership of the house and full custody of the children, and does so in documents that are all written in Japanese, would you be happy for your lawyer to just run them through Google Translate?

It might be fun with a hot
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Q4: if your Greek surgeon hasn't done a craniotomy before and needs to read up on it, but needs it translated from English into Greek would you be happy for him to just use Google Translate?

Q5: if your Japanese wife/husband files for divorce and claims ownership of the house and full custody of the children, and does so in documents that are all written in Japanese, would you be happy for your lawyer to just run them through Google Translate?

It might be fun with a hot water bottle (see below) but not if you are trying to use a new piece of machinery for the first time and the instructions are all in a foreign language.

hilarious_hot_water_bottle_instructions
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Mark Possemiers
Mark Possemiers  Identity Verified
Spain
Local time: 13:48
Member (2013)
Dutch to Spanish
+ ...
strange ... Oct 4, 2016

but often I see that Google translation mixes up the positive and negative in a sentence. It's a help at times, but still ...
I do understand people will always try to cut corners, but then I think legal people and the bean counters will prefer humans to check it - after all the AI hype, we see where bankers (futures and options ...) are at the moment. Anyone remembers Lehman or Deutsche?


 
Tom in London
Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 12:48
Member (2008)
Italian to English
Me too - Oct 4, 2016

mepossem wrote:

but often I see that Google translation mixes up the positive and negative in a sentence. It's a help at times, but still ...
I do understand people will always try to cut corners, but then I think legal people and the bean counters will prefer humans to check it - after all the AI hype, we see where bankers (futures and options ...) are at the moment. Anyone remembers Lehman or Deutsche?


I've noticed that too. GT often says exactly the opposite of what was intended.


 
Lingua 5B
Lingua 5B  Identity Verified
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Local time: 13:48
Member (2009)
English to Croatian
+ ...
Randomness. Oct 4, 2016

Tom in London wrote:

mepossem wrote:

but often I see that Google translation mixes up the positive and negative in a sentence. It's a help at times, but still ...
I do understand people will always try to cut corners, but then I think legal people and the bean counters will prefer humans to check it - after all the AI hype, we see where bankers (futures and options ...) are at the moment. Anyone remembers Lehman or Deutsche?


I've noticed that too. GT often says exactly the opposite of what was intended.


I have not noticed any patterns actually. Unlike human errors which often have some patterns.


 
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Google’s New Service Translates Languages Almost as Well as Humans Can







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