Google is one of the leading providers of artificial intelligence-assisted language translation, and the company now says a new technique for doing so is vastly improving the results. The company’s AI team calls it the Google Neural Machine Translation system, or GNMT, and it initially provided a less resource-intensive way to ingest a sentence in one language and produce that same sentence in another language. Instead of digesting each word or phrase as a standalone unit, as prior methods do, GNMT takes in the entire sentence as a whole. More.
See: The Verge
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Spain
Local time: 16:06
Spanish to English
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... the other one
Czech Republic
Local time: 16:06
French to English
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I'll personally take this assertion as a delicate way of saying that professional translators are superhumans.
United Kingdom
Local time: 15:06
Member (2008)
Italian to English
Ha ha
Why is so much effort being put in to developing computer systems and robots that, finally, it is hoped, will be able to do **what we already know how to do perfectly well** ???
[Edited at 2016-10-02 20:54 GMT]
Local time: 17:06
Romanian to English
+ ...
Ha ha
Why is so much effort being put in to developing computer systems and robots that, finally, it is hoped, will be able to do **what we already know how to do perfectly well** ???
[Edited at 2016-10-02 20:54 GMT]
For the same reason that they automate everything in manufacturing: it's cheaper.
The big difference they keep forgetting is that while automation in manufacturing does reduce the risk of human error, it's quite the opposite in the case of machine translation: the risk of error increases specifically because the work would be done by machines.
United Kingdom
Local time: 15:06
Member (2008)
Italian to English
Ha ha
Why is so much effort being put in to developing computer systems and robots that, finally, it is hoped, will be able to do **what we already know how to do perfectly well** ???
[Edited at 2016-10-02 20:54 GMT]
For the same reason that they automate everything in manufacturing: it's cheaper.
The big difference they keep forgetting is that while automation in manufacturing does reduce the risk of human error, it's quite the opposite in the case of machine translation: the risk of error increases specifically because the work would be done by machines.
It's worse than that: mankind is now devoting immense effort to spend the next 100 years sending humans to Mars and beyond in the hope of finding a habitable planet, when we already have one right here (if we would only look after it).
Italy
Local time: 16:06
Italian to Spanish
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We can't reverse this trend: every task that can be automated, it will be.
"The AI revolution is doing to whit collar jobs what robotics did tu blue collor jobs", this is a quote from "Race Against the Machine" by Erik Bryonjolsson and Andrew McAfee
http://raceagainstthemachine.com/
Translators have to re-invent themselves and become Global Linguist Consultants tout court
My 2 cen... See more
We can't reverse this trend: every task that can be automated, it will be.
"The AI revolution is doing to whit collar jobs what robotics did tu blue collor jobs", this is a quote from "Race Against the Machine" by Erik Bryonjolsson and Andrew McAfee
http://raceagainstthemachine.com/
Translators have to re-invent themselves and become Global Linguist Consultants tout court
My 2 cents
Kind regards from Italy ▲ Collapse
Local time: 17:06
Romanian to English
+ ...
http://raceagainstthemachine.com/
New Luddites of the world unite!
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Local time: 16:06
Member (2009)
English to Croatian
+ ...
You are hopefully aware that the way a person thinks, feels and perceives the world, is u... See more
You are hopefully aware that the way a person thinks, feels and perceives the world, is unique to each human being? And then they produce a unique language out of these unique features? How are you going to automate that? ▲ Collapse
Spain
Member (2014)
English to Spanish
+ ...
Automate poetry and you will kill it.
Automate journal articles and you can shut down the whole thing.
Automate medical texts and you will effectively kill someone.
What on earth are we going to automate, then? Weather reports? Fine by me, but that’s already automated.
Translating a text and manufacturing a door... See more
Automate poetry and you will kill it.
Automate journal articles and you can shut down the whole thing.
Automate medical texts and you will effectively kill someone.
What on earth are we going to automate, then? Weather reports? Fine by me, but that’s already automated.
Translating a text and manufacturing a door trim are two different undertakings, if we can accept that.
Oh, let's automate medical doctors too. Why should we pay them? Machines will do a better and cheaper job. Automate your psychologist too. Perhaps it's even cheaper to be a robot...
[Edited at 2016-10-03 18:01 GMT] ▲ Collapse
United Kingdom
Local time: 15:06
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
"The AI revolution is doing to whit collar jobs what robotics did tu blue collor jobs", this is a quote from "Race Against the Machine" by Erik Bryonjolsson and Andrew McAfee
Ray Kurzweil has been a cheerleader for AI - and making similar claims - for decades. While he's regarded by many as a visionary, his track record in predictions is, at best, rather mixed.
The two people you quote sound as if they have hold similar views to those of Kurzweil. But remember, they are just two individuals with strong and (possibly) well-articulated opinions. That does not mean they are or will be correct. They might well be totally wrong, just many proponents of AI in the 1980s were wrong.
And every task that can't, won't.
Dan
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Local time: 16:06
Member (2009)
English to Croatian
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Denmark
Local time: 16:06
Member (2003)
Danish to English
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But they come unstuck when they try to translate. They get far too literal, and the result is Scandinavian syntax with English words, and can in fact be quite hard work to understand, because they get the collocations wrong, or they are trapped by false ... See more
But they come unstuck when they try to translate. They get far too literal, and the result is Scandinavian syntax with English words, and can in fact be quite hard work to understand, because they get the collocations wrong, or they are trapped by false friends... dozens of little things.
English native bilinguals make another range of typical mistakes. If AI is not as good as these humans, it is not good enough for many purposes, even if it is adequate for some.
Qualified translators are aware of the traps, and carefully collect ways of avoiding them, but there are always more. Danish is my language of habitual usage, and I speak it as well as most natives... but never translate into Danish, except for very short, simple remarks and passages. It sounds fine to me at first, but if I read it again a couple of months later, I sometimes cringe!
As others have said, Google may get most of the gist, but it will never really be able to translate like an experienced human. It is impossible to categorise and code all the subtleties and anomalies. However many you note down, there will always be new traps and new contexts...
[Edited at 2016-10-04 23:31 GMT] ▲ Collapse
Netherlands
Local time: 16:06
Member (2009)
English to Dutch
See also more detailed criticism by Kirti Vashee and a number of experts, including a reply from Google.
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Local time: 16:06
Member (2009)
English to Croatian
+ ...
The next challenge is to commercialize NMT at a good economic price so it’s affordable—Tony O’Dowd
I need to see what I am actually buying. What a long article/text and not a single output sample sentence. I have never seen a serious linguistic research and claims before without providing sample sentences, words or phrases to support the claims.
Canada
Local time: 10:06
English to Chinese
+ ...
Hope to see more detail.
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