Translator in Industrial Revolution 4.0
The world is heading to the automation era (aka Industrial Revolution 4.0), where some human jobs are forecast to be replaced by computers equipped with artificial intelligence in 20 years to come. Cashier, accountant, tax preparers, drivers, even actors are on the top list. What about translators? Should they also pack up their stuff and find alternatives?
If you're a movie buff or a big fan of star wars, you'll definitely notice a human-look droid called C-3PO. George Lucas created it as a robot programmed for etiquette and protocol. And what I want to underline here is that it has the ability to fluently communicate in more than seven million forms (human language and machine protocol), a super fantastic skill beyond human's brain capacity. In some scenes, C-3PO simultaneously interprets conversation of human-droid; droid-monster; human-monster; or even monster-monster from different tribes, planet, or whatever they call it. Will C-3PO becomes the future version of translators?
At the moment, machine translation can produce text that is readable, sometimes understandable, and they are getting better. It is developed rapidly and seems to be smarter and more accurate in terms of word-to-word transposition. Considerable term-base capacity and corpus linguistics technology are two significant inventions for the development.
But one thing will never be invented by programmer behind any machine translation project, cultural-nuance algorithm. Cultural diversity is one thing that is too abstract to grasp, even by language.
Translation is not merely converting a word in one language into another, but it is more of meaning transfer. And when it comes to meaning, we should also deal with culture and interpersonal relationship.
Even though machine translation undoubtedly makes almost perfect grammar and syntax, it always needs human to take account of the sensibilities and nuance of the reader's culture. It's just too varied and unpredictable that needs super artificial intelligence embedded with human consciousness, which will be like C-3PO from star wars combined with Johnny Depp's brained computer in a 'Transcendence' movie.
Perhaps the most effective and efficient model of translation in the future will be a sort of hybrid. To make human's grammar and syntax flawless, we need a machine translation. But a machine needs human's consciousness to cover its sensibilities and cultural imperfectness.
The gold standard of translation in the future may be some kind of computer-assisted human translation—or, of you will, human-assisted computer translation.
Source:
https://www.starwars.com/databank/c-3po
https://www.ulatus.com/translation-blog/will-human-translators-be-replaced-by-computers-someday/
