Chris Findler says that the introduction of neural machine translation software has reduced the demand for human translators.
“I am pessimistic about the future of traditional translation jobs,” says Findler, a lecturer of translation and interpretation at National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU).
Online translators such as DeepL Translator, Yandex and Babylon offer accurate translations in dozens of languages, which means that a human translator may no longer be necessary for some jobs.
Photo: Wesley Lewis
Machine translation software’s growing influence is irreversible. Translation software can utilize artificial neural networks and large databases in order to accurately predict sequences of words and provide nuanced expressions in their results. AI’s presence in the field cannot be ignored, and translators in a variety of specialties will need to adapt to new job descriptions.
“With artificial intelligence taking over, some translation jobs will be more like editor jobs” Findler says.
Translation AI could be seen as a threat to jobs, but it has also created a new post-machine editing role. Findler says that there is a large demand for translators to edit and add a “human touch” to texts that have already been machine translated.
Photo: Wesley Lewis
Interpreters, and those in technical or media translation are more likely to be threatened or impacted by AI. Findler says that interpreters may eventually disappear due to AI’s ability to recognize speech and instantly process it to text. He adds that museum and literary translation are less threatened.
In Findler’s experience, museums in Taiwan still want to hire translators, but businesses are keener to opt for the more cost-effective option of using an online translation service. Furthermore, technical translators tend to deal with texts with repetitive language, which can more easily be machine translated.
Perry Svensson, the former head of translation at Taipei Times, says approximately 40 to 50 percent of his freelance Chinese-to-English and English-to-Swedish work is post-machine editing. He fixes the errors the machine translator might have made.
Photo: Wesley Lewis
He adds that most of his translation jobs five years ago were not already machine translated and required him to translate from scratch.
Svensson often uses DeepL Translator for articles and he makes minor changes to the translated text afterwards. Machine translators prove to be helpful when he is faced with multiple projects and deadlines.
Although they are useful, free machine translation services have decreased the amount of freelance translation jobs. Svensson translates for newspapers, logistics companies, as well as business ethics codes and product manuals. His advice for translators is to have multiple specialties in case AI renders human translators obsolete in a specific field.
Photo: Wesley Lewis
“If you are into photography, then your knowledge of that field will make for better translations,” Svensson says.
Ines Tsai (蔡淑瑛) works in television and translates for tourism programs, among others. She says that the technology for auto-generated subtitles exists, but it has not yet replaced human translators.
In her work she also comes across jobs where she is tasked to edit machine translated subtitles. She says that much of her work is to capture colloquial speech, jokes, idioms and other aspects of language that are still difficult for a machine to register and translate correctly.
For the moment, literary translators remain the least affected by machine translation software.
“Literary translation is a creative task that requires deep knowledge about multiple languages, cultures and literary traditions,” says Ji Lianbi (計連碧), a literary translation graduate student at Boston University.
Ji says that software can understand the basic meaning of a sentence but a word-for-word translation is often inauthentic and less expressive in the target language.
Anna Zelinska-Elliot, the director of literary translation at Boston University, says universities should be obligated to prepare translation students for a more technology-oriented profession. She adds that non-literary translation classes should address the impacts that machine translation is having in their field.
Although literary translation is not as impacted by AI, Zelinska-Elliot says that universities should familiarize the students with various online dictionaries, but not necessarily online translators.
As a university lecturer, Findler is afraid that students will be discouraged to study translation due to improving AI. He thinks that universities should merge interpretation and translation programs to produce well-rounded students as well as inform the students of the evolving job market.
Although AI has yet to completely replace human translators, there is no way to avoid its encroachment on their jobs.
For Findler, the future of the translation field is set in stone, adding that many traditional translation jobs, “are going to go the way of the horse and buggy.”
By 1971, heroin and opium use among US troops fighting in Vietnam had reached epidemic proportions, with 42 percent of American servicemen saying they’d tried opioids at least once and around 20 percent claiming some level of addiction, according to the US Department of Defense. Though heroin use by US troops has been little discussed in the context of Taiwan, these and other drugs — produced in part by rogue Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) armies then in Thailand and Myanmar — also spread to US military bases on the island, where soldiers were often stoned or high. American military policeman
Under pressure, President William Lai (賴清德) has enacted his first cabinet reshuffle. Whether it will be enough to staunch the bleeding remains to be seen. Cabinet members in the Executive Yuan almost always end up as sacrificial lambs, especially those appointed early in a president’s term. When presidents are under pressure, the cabinet is reshuffled. This is not unique to any party or president; this is the custom. This is the case in many democracies, especially parliamentary ones. In Taiwan, constitutionally the president presides over the heads of the five branches of government, each of which is confusingly translated as “president”
An attempt to promote friendship between Japan and countries in Africa has transformed into a xenophobic row about migration after inaccurate media reports suggested the scheme would lead to a “flood of immigrants.” The controversy erupted after the Japan International Cooperation Agency, or JICA, said this month it had designated four Japanese cities as “Africa hometowns” for partner countries in Africa: Mozambique, Nigeria, Ghana and Tanzania. The program, announced at the end of an international conference on African development in Yokohama, will involve personnel exchanges and events to foster closer ties between the four regional Japanese cities — Imabari, Kisarazu, Sanjo and
Sept. 1 to Sept. 7 In 1899, Kozaburo Hirai became the first documented Japanese to wed a Taiwanese under colonial rule. The soldier was partly motivated by the government’s policy of assimilating the Taiwanese population through intermarriage. While his friends and family disapproved and even mocked him, the marriage endured. By 1930, when his story appeared in Tales of Virtuous Deeds in Taiwan, Hirai had settled in his wife’s rural Changhua hometown, farming the land and integrating into local society. Similarly, Aiko Fujii, who married into the prominent Wufeng Lin Family (霧峰林家) in 1927, quickly learned Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) and
RSS