The Impact of Machine Translation on the Translation Profession

1. What happens when everyone can translate? • Anthony Pym • “

2. The history of MT

3. Where we are now • Online machine-translation services attract more than 500 million users and are offered in over 100 languages (Turovsky 2016). • For many language pairs and text types, postediting MT is faster and gives better terminology than translating from scratch.

4. Is neural really so much better?

5. Does MT let us think?

6. Does MT let us think?

7. Solving the problem • In September 2009, Obama’s “Strategy for American Innovation” included: • "automatic, highly accurate and real-time translation between the major languages of the world - greatly lowering the barriers to international commerce and collaboration."

8. What’s wrong with singularity?

9. What’s wrong with singularity?

10. Dispelling the myths 1 • “Humans will always translate better than a machine.” • Machines do not translate. • They find previous human translations. (MT capital is dead human labor.)

11. Dispelling the myths 2 • “The bigger the database, the better the MT.” • MT needs clean data, not better data. • The Human Language Project did not work. • There is no virtuous circle.

12. Dispelling the myths 3 • “MT has reached parity with humans.” • Hassan et al. (2018): 18M bilingual sentence pairs being evaluated by ‘bilingual crowd workers’, who were asked whether the candidate translation conveyed ‘the semantics of the source text’. • Readers of isolated sentences cannot tell which one was done by MT. • The test concerns content, not form. • The test concerns isolated sentences. • The test does not associate risk with error.

13. Dispelling the myths 3

14. Dispelling the myths 4 • “MT will never work.” • ***Mise en garde*** • Comme le reconnaissent les concepteurs de logiciels de traduction automatique eux-mêmes, nous sommes encore loin du jour où ces outils pourront produire une traduction de qualité comparable à celle des traductions produites par les êtres humains. • Dans le cadre de son mandat de protection du public, l'OTTIAQ vous recommande donc la plus grande prudence et vous invite à faire affaire avec un traducteur agréé pour tous vos besoins de traduction.

15. Dispelling the myths 5 • “MT spells the end of the translation profession.” • “… statistical-based MT, along with its many hybrids, is destined to turn most translators into posteditors one day, perhaps soon” (Pym 2013) • “Translators do more than translate.” (Pym 1998)

16. What MT tends not to give us • Copying words • Copying structure • Perspective change • Density change • Cultural correspondence • Text tailoring

17. Translatorial action:

18. Dispelling the myths 5 • From the Centre for Next Generation Localisation (Dublin), 2010

19. Wei (2018) in Li (2018)

20. Wei (2018) adjusted

21. MT is used in… • Much language learning • Tourism • Gist translation for many purposes • A democratized understanding of cultural others • Security surveillance

22. Refugees and asylum seekers • Mobile subjects use MT before visiting a doctor. • They use it to check on laws. • They prefer it to using interpreters.

23. Risk society (Beck 1986, Giddens 1999) • The relation between cause and effect is complex and cannot be controlled directly. • Authoritative intermediaries are not trusted (doctors, banks, scientists, electricity companies… translators?).

24. The role of translators? • Catford on where indeterminism stops: • “The discovery of textual equivalents is based on the authority of a competent bilingual informant or translator.” (1965: 27) • The translator authorizes the translation. • Translators assume authority.

25. Looking for a future for translators • MT creates jobs in: • Postediting (selling trustworthiness / authority) • Pre-editing (technical writing) • Revision and reviewing • Project management • Terminology • Database management • Interpreting translated data • Rewriting (public relations, marketing, cross-cultural consulting)