Generative artificial intelligence has posed a major threat to translation？
The British Writers Association conducted this survey on translators in January this year. Respondents included 787 SOA members, and their work covered fictional writers, nonfiction writers, screenwriters, poets, journalists and translators. More than one-third of the translators interviewed lost their jobs because of the development of generative artificial intelligence, and more than 14% said that their translation income was reduced because of the development of artificial intelligence. When it comes to future expectations, more than three-quarters of the respondents believe that new technologies will have a negative impact on their income.
The survey also shows that 37% of translators use artificial intelligence to support their work. At the same time, despite the general threat brought by artificial intelligence, many translators still believe that the initiative of truly good translation works is still in the hands of human beings. Thomas Bunstead, a Spanish translator, said that "the job entrusted to artificial intelligence will be a simple job of putting butter and bread together". In the era of artificial intelligence, it is important to distinguish between "literary translation" and "commercial translation", and the former is still the territory of human beings.
Stills of AI times.
However, smalley, a translator, thinks that at least translators of popular novels such as crime and romance will get less jobs, and this process will inevitably raise the competition threshold for more complicated translation work. Ian Giles, co-chairman of the Translation Association, affirmed this trend. He said that since the beginning of 2023, his income from commercial translation has fallen sharply. As more and more translators switch to serious literary translation, this disguised situation has also made the situation of translators difficult.
The disadvantage of human translators is that publishers have a very positive attitude towards generative artificial intelligence. A publisher that Gilles worked for before has turned to a workflow called "post-editing", that is, the work is pre-translated by artificial intelligence, and human translators only check and adjust the translation results. Robert Carsten Carlberg, CEO of translation company Nuanxed, said that it is very important for translation companies and publishers to keep up with the pace of technology. "Integrating artificial intelligence into the translator’s toolbox will improve productivity without sacrificing quality".
In 2023, Duolingo, one of the largest language learning applications in the world, experienced several rounds of layoffs. According to the report of Washington post, many neighboring countries gradually laid off contract translators and contractors, and focused on the development of artificial intelligence. Sam Dalcy, a spokesman for the company, said that the company cut its outsourcing translation business by about 10% by the end of 2023. Benjamin Costello, a Russian translator from Baltimore, said that after being fired by many neighboring countries, he entered the application and used the courses he had written before, and found many mistakes. Maybe it’s to save costs, but it reduces the quality of the course.
In March of this year, many neighboring countries officially launched a dialogue mode based on GPT4 technology using OpenAI. They are also trying to use artificial intelligence to create sentences previously written by humans for language learning courses, but sentences written by "completely" artificial intelligence have not yet been applied.
Although the development of generative artificial intelligence is in full swing, Costello’s concern is not a case. Ben Karl, director of the American Translation Association (ATA), once said that translation tools driven by generative artificial intelligence have some fatal defects. For example, it does not perform well in dealing with the complexity of human language. Human language contains a lot of weird idiosyncrasies (for example, in different countries and regions, the common word "dinner" may refer to completely different meanings), which makes it difficult for current artificial intelligence to deal with it. At some point, the influence of mistranslation is disastrous. A report published in the British newspaper The Guardian in 2023 tells a vivid case: the dependence on artificial intelligence translation makes it impossible for asylum-seeking political refugees to pass through the customs and be rejected by the United States.
Ethan Mollick, an associate professor at wharton school, believes that the development of emerging hot technologies such as generative artificial intelligence usually creates a large number of employment opportunities, but it does not mean that most individuals replaced by automation can get these opportunities. Importantly, this trend will lead to the prevalence of odd-job economy, which will aggravate the risk and instability of work. Ofer Shoshan, CEO of translation company One Hour Translation, said in an interview with Forbes magazine that it is worthy of long-term attention whether artificial translation will launch a new "Lude Movement" for artificial intelligence in the future. To some extent, human translation is similar to the situation of 4 million truck drivers in the United States facing the development of automatic trucks.
Reference link:
1. Survey finds generative AI proving major threat to the work of translators
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/apr/16/survey-finds-generative-ai-proving-major-threat-to-the-work-of-translators
2. Duolingo sheds some human workers as AI threatens to upend the $65 billion translation industry
https://www.fastcompany.com/91009816/duolingo-contractors-humans-ai-translation-industry-disruption
3. Duolingo cuts workers as it relies more on AI
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/01/10/duolingo-ai-layoffs/
4. Will Machine Learning AI Make Human Translators An Endangered Species?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2018/08/24/will-machine-learning-ai-make-human-translators-an-endangered-species/? sh=6462e7113902
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