Names translated as months of the year, incorrect time frames and mixed-up pronouns — the everyday failings of artificial intelligence-driven (AI) translation apps are causing havoc in the US asylum system, critics say.
“We have countless examples of this nature,” said Ariel Koren, founder of Respond Crisis Translation, a global collective that has translated more than 13,000 asylum applications, warning that errors can lead to unfounded denials.
In one case, she said, attorneys missed a crucial detail in a woman’s account of domestic abuse because the translation app they were using kept breaking down, and they ran out of time.
Illustration: Kevin Sheu
“The machines themselves are not operating with even a fraction of the quality they need to be able to do case work that’s acceptable for someone in a high-stakes situation,” said Koren, who used to work for Google Translate.
She told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that a translator with the group had estimated that 40 percent of Afghan asylum cases he had worked on had encountered problems due to machine translation. Cases involving Haitian Creole speakers have also faced significant issues, she added.
Government contractors and large aid organizations are increasingly using AI machine translation tools due to “an immense amount of incentive to cut costs,” Koren said.
The extent to which such tools are being used in US immigration processing is unclear amid a broad lack of transparency, said Aliya Bhatia, a policy analyst with the Center for Democracy & Technology think tank.
“We know governments and asylum lobbies around the world ... are moving toward using automated technology,” Bhatia said.
A 2019 report from investigative news outlet ProPublica found that immigration officials were being directed to use Google Translate to “vet” social media use for refugee applications.
The US Department of Justice, and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency did not respond to requests for comment, nor did the White House, which recently released a national “blueprint” on AI guidelines.
Asked about concerns over the use of machine translation in asylum cases, a spokesperson for Google said its Google Translate tool underwent strict quality controls and pointed out that it was offered free of charge.
“We rigorously train and test our systems to ensure each of the 133 languages we support meets a high standard for translation quality,” the spokesperson said.
A major shortcoming of translation tools’ use in asylum cases stems from the difficulty of building in checks, said Gabe Nicholas, a research fellow with the Center for Democracy & Technology and coauthor with Bhatia of a paper on the models being used for machine translation.
“Because the person speaks only one language, the potential for mistakes and errors to go uncaught is really, really high,” he said.
Machine translation has made significant progress in recent years, Nicholas and Bhatia said, adding that it is still nowhere near good enough to be relied upon in often complex, high-stakes situations such as the asylum process.
A core problem is how the apps are trained in the first place — on digitized text, for which there are masses available for English, but far less for other languages.
This not only results in less nuanced or simply incorrect translations, but it also means English or some other high-resource languages become “intermediaries though which these models view the world,” Bhatia said.
The result is Anglocentric translations that often fail to accurately capture crucial details around a particular word.
Like many other sectors, the translation industry has been upended in recent months by the release of “generative” AI tools such as ChatGPT.
“ChatGPT and AI are now on everybody’s minds,” said Jill Kushner Bishop, founder and CEO of Multilingual Connections, a company based in the Chicago area.
“There are cases for it, and those are more and more compelling all the time. But it’s still not ready in most cases to be used with the training wheels off and without a human involved,” Bishop said.
The company does regular testing of tools and different languages, production director Katie Baumann said, but continues to find problems with text translations involving, say, Turkish or Japanese, or AI-driven audio transcriptions with background noise.
“We’ve run tests of extracts of law enforcement interviews, processing and putting it through machine translation — a lot of it is nonsense. It wouldn’t save you any time, so we wouldn’t use it,” Baumann said.
So even as Multilingual Connections does increasingly use machine translation, a human is always involved.
“You don’t know what you don’t know. So for someone who is not a speaker of the language ... you don’t know where the mistakes will be,” Bishop said.
“Think about asylum cases ... and what might be misunderstood without a human verifying,” she said.
OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT, declined to comment, but a spokesperson pointed to policies that bar use for “high-risk government decisionmaking” including law enforcement, criminal justice, migration and asylum.
At Respond Crisis Translation, the shortcomings of AI-driven translation tools are also creating an extra layer of work for Koren and her colleagues.
“The people who need to clean up the mess are human translators,” she said.
One of the collective’s translators, Samara Zuza, has been working for three years with a Brazilian asylum seeker whose asylum papers were poorly translated by an AI app while he was in immigration detention in California, she said.
The application was “full of insane mistakes,” Zuza said. “The names of the city and state are wrong. The sentences are reversed — and that’s the form that was sent to the court.”
She thinks it was these inaccuracies that resulted in the rejection of initial attempts to secure the man’s release. The man, who asked to be identified only as Carlos, a pseudonym, was eventually released in May 2020 after the two started working together.
“The language was the worst aspect for me,” Carlos, 49, said of his six months in immigration detention after he fled gang activity in Brazil.
He spoke by phone from Massachusetts, where he is now living as he applies for US residency.
Carlos, who is illiterate and speaks Brazilian Portuguese, said he had been unable to communicate with immigration officials or even other detainees for months.
To fill out his asylum paperwork, he relied on a tablet computer’s voice recorder coupled with an app that used machine translation.
“So many of the words were being wrongly translated,” he said. “My asylum papers were a terrible mess.”
Many local news media over the past week have reported on Internet personality Holger Chen’s (陳之漢) first visit to China between Tuesday last week and yesterday, as remarks he made during a live stream have sparked wide discussions and strong criticism across the Taiwan Strait. Chen, better known as Kuan Chang (館長), is a former gang member turned fitness celebrity and businessman. He is known for his live streams, which are full of foul-mouthed and hypermasculine commentary. He had previously spoken out against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and criticized Taiwanese who “enjoy the freedom in Taiwan, but want China’s money”
A high-school student surnamed Yang (楊) gained admissions to several prestigious medical schools recently. However, when Yang shared his “learning portfolio” on social media, he was caught exaggerating and even falsifying content, and his admissions were revoked. Now he has to take the “advanced subjects test” scheduled for next month. With his outstanding performance in the general scholastic ability test (GSAT), Yang successfully gained admissions to five prestigious medical schools. However, his university dreams have now been frustrated by the “flaws” in his learning portfolio. This is a wake-up call not only for students, but also teachers. Yang did make a big
As former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) concludes his fourth visit to China since leaving office, Taiwan finds itself once again trapped in a familiar cycle of political theater. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) has criticized Ma’s participation in the Straits Forum as “dancing with Beijing,” while the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) defends it as an act of constitutional diplomacy. Both sides miss a crucial point: The real question is not whether Ma’s visit helps or hurts Taiwan — it is why Taiwan lacks a sophisticated, multi-track approach to one of the most complex geopolitical relationships in the world. The disagreement reduces Taiwan’s
Former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) is visiting China, where he is addressed in a few ways, but never as a former president. On Sunday, he attended the Straits Forum in Xiamen, not as a former president of Taiwan, but as a former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairman. There, he met with Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference Chairman Wang Huning (王滬寧). Presumably, Wang at least would have been aware that Ma had once been president, and yet he did not mention that fact, referring to him only as “Mr Ma Ying-jeou.” Perhaps the apparent oversight was not intended to convey a lack of
RSS