Go with the flow

I faced some home truths too. You see, I write Dutch and English feature articles for magazines. I either talk to home owners, or provide them with a list of questions about their home, the answers to which I use to write the feature. But not all the homes are in The Netherlands and not all the home owners speak Dutch or English. So, what’s the solution? I use tools such as Deepl to translate the questions into the required language and to translate the answers back into either Dutch or English. Then I used the information to write a unique piece about the home. I told myself that was fine, because I still wrote the end product.

I know it’s not quite the same as translating an entire book, but the bottom line is, these tools are available, and people are going to use them. It’s progress, and that’s how it’s always been.

It’s no different from my kids being allowed to use really fancy calculators during exams, while in my time, we had to learn formulas by heart, write them out and do the sums manually.

I haven’t forgotten how thrilled I was with my Commodore 64 and Word Perfect back in the day. Now, that’s going back a bit, but I embraced it 100%.

And let’s not forget how much easier it is for almost anyone to create a website using WordPress!

So yes, I am willing to embrace AI, while remaining constructively critical. I certainly no longer believe that I have nothing left to offer. On the contrary, in a world of tight deadlines, I can put my time to good use fine-tuning and tweaking and, more importantly, advising and mentoring.

I read some articles on AI and came up with the following:

Benefits:

1. AI Translations are surprisingly accurate, almost as accurate as human translators.
2. AI Translation is also faster than manual translation.
3. Humans are freed up to perform quality control tasks.
4. AI translators can, in case of web texts, also automatically optimize for SEO.
5. AI translators can act as invaluable assistants to human translators, freeing up their time for quality tasks, such as fine-tuning and transcreation.

Potential negatives:

1. Cultural misunderstandings. AI translators may be more accurate than ever, but they aren’t humans with a deep knowledge of local cultures; in the worst case scenario, AI content might be misleading or offensive to locals.
2. Some texts, such as technical manuals, are complex, and AI translation tools may struggle with source texts that are obscure or ambiguous.
3. An AI translation, while it may be accurate, may lack nuance and humour. Computers aren’t good at making texts engaging and fun to read.

To sum up:

Translation systems, however powerful, cannot replicate the cognitive processes of humans. AI can’t tell jokes or use colloquialisms. It doesn’t have the sense of style and fluency that real-world writers possess. AI translation systems need humans to give contextual meaning to texts.

AI translation means projects are easier to manage and have a shorter turn around. However, although AI is suited to several roles, it should never be used as the sole translator. Instead, most transcreation and translation services can use machine or AI translation to set up an initial translation, and leave the fine-tuning to humans.

AI is not replacing the writer, editor or translator. AI complements those roles. And I am ready to accept the role of AI. Are you?

See also:

https://aicontentfy.com/en/blog/impact-of-ai-on-content-translation-and-localization

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