The 4,000 Lines of Code Harvard Hopes Will Change Translation (2017)
For quality translation of complex, non repetitive ideas, a human is, and will always be required.<p>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.<p>We are based in Canada, where we receive around 300,000 new immigrants per year. That&#x27;s 6 million over those 20 years. Guess what? Those people are hitting the job market, and now, their children too.<p>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 &quot;transcreation&quot;, 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.<p>I really don&#x27;t see how machines could distill the ideas out of a text and reinterpret them in a nice way.<p>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!