15/07/2022
When technology has intervened in every niche of human life, a question is raised "Can Artificial Intelligence (AI) completely replace human participation in translation?" To address this question, we should have a look at its pros and cons below.
Advantages:
✅Speedy translation delivery: AI-based translation tools provide users instant translations with a click of mouse, which brings a great convenience for monolingual people and travelers. For instance, they are well-suited for reading menus in foreign languages or deciphering street signs. Moreover, with the help of built-in-app scanner by camera phone, people no longer waste time typing every single letter, rather they would scan the text that needs translation and get the product in a few seconds, especially to the languages that do not use the Latin language system.
✅Large language selection: According to statistics, AI can process two-way translation for more than 100 languages globally, including rare languages which are used by a small number of people. AI also provides specific dialects of the same language. For example, people in Taiwan and Hong Kong use traditional Chinese as their mother tongue while people in China use simplified Chinese.
✅Cost reduction: As AI-driven translation improves and learns from time to time, most of the work can be done by machine translation which decreases human involvement in translation.
Disadvantages:
❌Cultural misunderstanding: AI assistance in translation is useful and accurate to some extent, however, to culture and art, it possibly causes misleading information and insults to local people. To translate a text related to culture, it requires a deep knowledge of local cultures, such as cultural norms and values. Also, to a product of art, a robot may convey the author's hidden message improperly or wrongly.
❌Risk of confidentiality: Most translation tools appear online, so businesses may face the risk of exposed sensitive private data when there is a sudden crash or cyber attack.
❌Lack of real-world common sense: AI translators are programmed to translate word for word, so it struggles to translate colloquialisms, slangs, and idioms which always appear in films, daily conversations, literature and music. For example, they can miss out irony or metaphor in a piece of literature. What is more, AI is unable to update trendy phrases and find equivalents to them.
How to make use of it:
👉AI can play a good role of quality control by checking human texts for errors.
👉AI provides various versions of translation, so translators should read, consider, and make some amendments appropriate to the target text.
👉AI proves effective in localization project management. They can create content and translation automatically, monitor workflows to meet cost and time milestones.