Not so long ago, in 2023, to be more clear, our Managing Partner, Giovanna (Gio) Lester, was invited by the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA) to participate in a panel titled “Automation and/or Augmentation: ‘What could AI do on its own?’ becomes ‘What should we do and when?'”
The panel on AI in translation was moderated by former AMTA president Steve Richardson, and the other panelists were Arle Lommel, senior research analyst at CSA Research, Donald Barabé, former president of OTTIAQ (Order of Certified Translators and Terminologists of Quebec), Markus Freitag, senior staff research scientist and head of translate research at Google.
The Past, the Present, and the Future Through the Eyes of the Panelists
Steve kicked off the conversation by talking about the hype behind artificial intelligence in translation, starting in the 1950s through now. In the opening statements, Arle Lommel talked about the blended services wave that brings machine and humans together, the fundamental changes we are experiencing, and how machine augmentation of human services will become the rule rather than human replacement. Donald Barabé reminded us that if the populations of the US, China, and Indonesia were combined, and if each one of those 2 billion individuals were to become professional translators, they would be able to translate about 0.01% of the world’s daily content into 100 languages out of the 7,000 languages in our planet (CSA Research data from 2019). Giovanna Lester commented on how science fiction informed the future she envisioned, which is unfolding before us, concluding that we should be open to what technology and innovation are delivering to us by continually unlearning and learning. Markus Freitag, who builds machine translation models, discussed the parity between machine translation and human translation (which is based on low-quality human translation), concluding that machine translation is still far from achieving parity with high-quality human translation, despite improvements.
If you would like to learn more about AMTA’s services and research, please visit their website. We invite you to watch the very informative panel below.