Language Log

"Will AI make translators redundant?"  By Rachel Melzi, Inquiry (3 Dec 2024)

The author is a freelance Italian to English translator of long standing, so she is well equipped to respond to the question she has raised.  Having read through her article and the companion piece on AI in general (e.g., ChatGPT and other LLMs) in the German magazine Wildcat (featuring Cybertruck [10/21/23]) (the article is available in English translation [11/10/23]), I respond to the title question with a resounding "No!".  My reasons for saying so will be given throughout this post, but particularly at the very end.

The author asks:

How good is AI translation?

Already in 2020, two thirds of professional translators used “Computer-assisted translation” or CAT (CSA Research, 2020). Whereas “machine translation” translates whole documents, and thus is meant to replace human translation, CAT supports it: the computer makes suggestions on how to translate words and phrases as the user proceeds through the original text. The software can also remind users how they have translated a particular word or phrase in the past, or can be trained in a specific technical language, for instance, by feeding it legal or medical texts. CAT software is currently based on Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models, which are trained through bilingual text data to recognise patterns across different languages. This differs from Large Language Models (LLM), such as ChatGTP, which are trained using a broader database of all kinds of text data from across the internet. As a result of their different databases, NMTs are more accurate at translation and LLMs are better at generating new text.

"Oh, you've never read The Odyssey???"

Your timing is perfect. Emily Wilson's translation is the best one in literally ages, has that sweet iambic pentameter to give it a "bouncy" feel, & makes dudebros cry that the classic has "gone woke". pic.twitter.com/zN5uSPTJSY

— Librarian Mama (@hyuumanatees) December 26, 2024

A couple of days ago we examined the mystifying Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese (LS/CC) collocation 惡惡 (here).  After considering several different ways to pronounce and interpret the elements of this expression, we decided that, in most instances, it should be read wùè and be rendered as "hate evil".

Today we'll go much more slowly and deliberately through a brief classical occurrence of 惡惡 to gain a better appreciation for the meaning of the dyad 惡惡 and how to appreciate its nuances in actual use.

Here I shall quote a short passage from Lǐjì 禮記 (Record of rites) (ca. 3rd c.-1st c. BC):

Suǒwèi chéng qí yì zhě, wú zì qī yě, rú wù èchòu, rú hào hǎosè, cǐ zhī wèi zì qiān. Gù jūnzǐ bì shèn qí dú yě.

所謂誠其意者、毋自欺也。如惡惡臭、如好好色。此之謂自謙、故君子必愼其獨也。

We've looked at the Chinese of the first item en passant before (here), but not in detail, and the English of this version merits investigation:

"Some idioms and terms pertaining to Japan's favorite grain", by Yuko Tamura, The Japan Times (9/25/24)

Rice is an essential part of the Japanese diet, so naturally it's also a part of the language. In fact, the word for "meal," ご飯 (gohan), also means "cooked rice." Before it's cooked, however, you'll see it referred to as 米 (kome). Below are a few terms and idioms that either use the kanji for rice or refer to it in some form.

• 朝飯前 (Asameshi mae): No sweat, a piece of cake. Something that can be done before breakfast. Ex., それくらい朝飯前だよ (Sore kurai asameshi mae da yo, That’s no trouble at all).
• 日常茶飯事 (Nichijō sahanji): Common, everyday things such as drinking tea or eating food that are a part of daily life. Ex., 彼の遅刻は日常茶飯事だ (Kare no chikoku wa nichijō sahanji da, His being late is a usual thing).

So says DeepL CEO Jarek Kutylowski.

"DeepL translation targets Taiwan as next key Asian market:  CEO says AI-based model is aiming to refine nuances, politeness", Steven Borowiec, Nikkei staff writer (September 16, 2024)

DeepL Write is one thing, DeepL Translator is another.  We've examined both on Language Log and are aware that the former is already deeply entrenched as a tool for composition assistance, but are less familiar with the special features of the latter.

The article by Borowiec, based on his interview with CEO Jarek Kutylowski, begins with some not very enlightening remarks about the difference between simplified characters on the mainland and traditional characters on Taiwan, attesting to the truism that CEOs and CFOs often don't know as much about the nitty-gritty technicalities of the products they sell as do the scientists and specialists they hire to make them.

The bottle of body wash affixed to the wall of the shower in the Cheyenne hotel where I'm staying is labeled in French as "Savon Liquide pour le Corps".

English "body wash" is two words consisting of eight letters.  "Savon Liquide pour le Corps" is five words consisting of twenty-three letters.

We've discussed the phenomenon of French verbosity versus English brevity before.  See  "The genius and logic of French and English" 4/11/23) and "French vs. English" (8/2/15) — also about "soap".

Surely, I thought, the French do not have to be that loquacious just to say something so simple as "body wash".

[This is a guest post by Thomas Batchelor]

I was recently looking at a tourist bus around the Matsu Islands of Taiwan, and they have a timetable online with the route and locations for picking up passengers, as below.

[VHM:  Don't trouble yourself by trying to read the fine print of the schedule itself.  Just pay attention to the note about the pickup location at the bottom of the schedule, which is enlarged below the fold.]

First, a few words about the text, after which I will introduce the Sinologist who undertook this monumental philological task, Manfred W. Frühauf.

English:

The Mu Tianzi Zhuan, or Records of [King] Mu, the Son of Heaven, is con­sider­ed to be the ear­liest and longest ex­tant trav­e­logue in Chinese literature. It describes the jour­neys of King Mu (r. 976-922 BC or 956-918 BC) of the Zhou Dynasty (c.1046-256 BC) to the farthest corners of his realm and beyond in the 10th century BC. Harnessing his famous eight noble steeds he visits dis­tant clans and nations such as the Quanrong, Chiwu, and Jusou, exchanging gifts with all of them; he scales the awe-inspiring Kunlun mountains and meets with legendary Xiwangmu ("Queen Mother of the West"); he watches exotic animals, and he orders his men to mine huge quantities of precious jade for transport back to his cap­i­tal. The travelogue ends with a de­tailed account of the mourning ceremonies during the burial of a favorite lady of the king.

From IA:

By way of introduction to what you see below under the asterisks, regarding the (not-always) technical reasons for the paucity of webpages in Mongolian script, see some of the comments here, especially the one at the top (Greg Pringle).

I might mention that the president of Mongolia's webpage in Mongolian script — which he links to — only displays correctly for me in Chrome, not in Firefox and not on my iPhone (Safari).

"Not Lost In Translation: How Barbarian Books Laid the Foundation for Japan’s Industrial Revolution", by Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution (July 22, 2024)

I am grateful to Alex Tabarrok and his colleague Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution University of George Mason University's Mercatus Center for introducing me to what is one of the most mind-boggling/blowing papers I have read in the last decade.

First, here is Tabarrok's introduction, and that will be followed by selections from the revolutionary paper to which I am referring.

Japan’s growth miracle after World War II is well known but that was Japan’s second miracle. The first was perhaps even more miraculous. At the end of the 19th century, under the Meiji Restoration, Japan transformed itself almost overnight from a peasant economy to an industrial powerhouse.

After centuries of resisting economic and social change, Japan transformed from a relatively poor, predominantly agricultural economy specialized in the exports of unprocessed, primary products to an economy specialized in the export of manufactures in under fifteen years.

There has long been a suspicion that the first Chinese translator of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928/1932), Ráo Shùyī 饒述一, about whom next to nothing is known, was actually the scholar and theoretician of aesthetics, Zhū Guāngqián 朱光潛 (1897-1986).

To give a little bit of background about the nature of the two translations of the novel, here is the abstract of a recent scholarly article comparing them:

This article discusses how sex-related content is rendered in two Chinese translations of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover: Rao Shuyi (1936) and Zhao Susu (2004). It is found that Rao's translation features explicitness, flexibility and Europeanization, while Zhao's translation features conservativeness and domestication. And the observed features in the two translations regarding sex-related content are explained from perspectives of social and historical background, translation purpose and intended readership, and patronage. Index Terms–Lady Chatterley's Lover, translation, sexuality

Zhu, Kun. "The Translation of Sex-related Content in Lady Chatterley's Lover in China." Theory and Practice in Language Studies, vol. 10, no. 8, Aug. 2020, pp. 933+. Gale Literature Resource Center.