In the myth about the Tower of Babel, people decided to build a tower-city that would reach the heavens. And then the Creator realized that nothing would restrain people anymore and they would think of themselves for no reason. Then God created different languages to hinder people and so that they could no longer work together easily. Today, thanks to technology, we experience an unprecedented connectedness. However, we still live in the shadow of the Tower of Babel. Language remains a barrier in business and marketing. Despite the fact that technological gadgets can easily and quickly connect, people from different parts of the world often cannot.
Translation agencies are trying to keep up: they make presentations, contracts, outsourcing instructions and advertisements for everyone. Some agencies also offer so-called “localization”. For example, if a company enters the market in Quebec, it needs to advertise in Quebec French, not European French. Companies can be seriously hurt by incorrect translation.
Global markets are waiting, but language translation by artificial intelligence is not ready yet, despite recent advances in natural language processing and sentiment analysis. AI still struggles to process requests even in one language, let alone translate. In November 2016, Google added a neural network to its translator. But some of her translations are still socially and grammatically weird. Why?
“To Google's credit, the company has introduced quite a few improvements that came almost overnight. But I don't really use them. Language is hard,”says Michael Houseman, chief research scientist at RapportBoost. AI and lecturer at Singularity University.
He explains that the ideal scenario for machine learning and artificial intelligence would be with fixed rules and clear criteria for success or failure. Chess is an obvious example, and so is go. The computer very quickly mastered these games, because the rules are clear and precise, and the set of moves is limited.
“The language is almost exactly the opposite. There are no clear and precise rules. A conversation can go in an infinite number of different directions. And, of course, you need tagged data as well. You need to tell the machine what it is doing right and what is not."
Hausman noted that it is fundamentally difficult to designate information labels in a language. “The two translators cannot agree on the correctness of the translation,” he says. "Language is the Wild West in terms of data."
Google technology is now able to understand complete sentences without trying to translate individual words. But glitches still happen. Jörg Mayfud, Associate Professor of Spanish and Latin Literature at Jacksonville University explains why accurate translations are not yet given to artificial intelligence:
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“The problem is that it is not enough to understand the whole proposal. Just as the meaning of a single word depends on the rest of the sentence (mostly in English), the meaning of a sentence depends on the rest of the paragraph and the text as a whole, and the meaning of the text depends on the culture, the speaker's intentions, and more. Sarcasm and irony, for example, only make sense in a broad context. Idioms can also be problematic for automated translation."
“Google translation is a great tool if you use it as a tool, that is, without trying to replace human learning or understanding,” he says. “A few months ago I went to buy a drill at Home Depot and read the sign under the machine: Saw machine. (Machine saw). Below was the Spanish translation of 'La máquina vió,' which means “The machine saw it”. “Saw” was translated not as a noun, but as a past tense verb.
Dr. Mayfud cautions: “We need to be aware of the fragility of this interpretation. Because to translate is essentially to interpret, not just an idea, but also a feeling. Human feelings and ideas that only humans can understand - and sometimes even we humans cannot understand other people."
He noted that culture, gender and even age can create obstacles to this understanding, and over-reliance on technology leads to our cultural and political decline. Dr. Mayfud mentioned that the Argentinean writer Julio Cortazar referred to the dictionaries as “graveyards”. Automatic translators could be called “zombies”.
Eric Cambria, an AI academic and professor at Nanyang University of Technology in Singapore, focuses on natural language processing, which is at the heart of AI-powered translators. Like Dr. Mayfood, he sees the complexity and risks in this direction. "There are so many things we do unconsciously when we read text." Reading requires many unrelated tasks that are beyond the power of automatic translators.
“The biggest problem with machine translation today is that we tend to move from the syntactic form of a sentence in the input language to the syntactic form of that sentence in the target language. We humans don't do that. We first decode the meaning of the sentence in the input language, and then we encode that meaning in the target language."
In addition, there are cultural risks associated with these transfers. Dr. Ramesh Srinivasan, director of the Digital Culture Lab at the University of California, Los Angeles, says new technology tools sometimes reflect underlying biases.
“There should be two parameters that determine how we design 'smart systems'. One is the values and, so to speak, the biases of the system builder. The second is the world in which the system will learn. If you create AI systems that reflect the preconceptions of your creator and the wider world, there are sometimes very impressive failures.”
Dr. Srivanisan says translation tools must be transparent about opportunities and limitations. "You see, the idea that one system can take languages (which are very diverse semantically and syntactically) and combine them, or generalize to some extent, or even make one whole, is ridiculous."
Mary Cochran, co-founder of Launching Labs Marketing, sees commercial growth potential. She noted that listings in online markets like Amazon could, in theory, be automatically translated and optimized for buyers in other countries.
“I think we've only touched the tip of the iceberg right now, so to speak, in terms of what AI can do with marketing. And with improved translation and globalization around the world, AI can't help but lead to explosive market growth."
Ilya Khel