AI is making me believe in the concept of the soul because soulless is the perfect way to describe its output.
From the existentialist ramblings of Russian philosophers that to this day still linger in the gloomy streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg, to the hope-filled lines of Tolkien’s epic high-fantasy, and the anti-war Tralfamadorians (or so it goes!), or the dystopian—or perhaps realistic—world of Orwell’s 1984. Whatever book, whatever genre, whatever year or decade, they all share one thing in common: their very human authors, who at one point, sat somewhere—perhaps even paced in frustration—to come up with the perfect word or sentence for their books.
Their soul, thoughts and experiences bleed through each page and the readers get to live, even for a little bit, someone else’s life.
And this applies to any art and discipline, including translation—specially translation. Without translators, more than half of the world wouldn’t know any of the books referenced before.
So what happens when those very human authors get replaced by something not human? Say… by Artificial Intelligence?
Artificial Intelligence, which by the way, is neither artificial nor intelligent, is on the rise and doesn’t seem to be a stop to it. But has it come to stay? It is hard to say (if you ask me, I would answer: definitely not!) It has happened before, during the industrial revolution when all artisans got replaced, but nowadays, organic/artisanal products are sought after luxuries, even if perhaps this isn’t the best comparison.
This technology has been depicted in many sci-fi works and it rarely ever ends well; cue the AI going insane, betraying humans or something along those lines.
And while we are not at that point yet, AI has a very bad track record all the same. Hence my statement of this technology being neither artificial nor intelligent as it quite literally depends on real artists—of any iteration of the arts—to exist, needing to get fed, rarely in a legal way, with everything that gets uploaded on the internet.
The rebranding of linear algebra to “Artificial Intelligence” was definitely one hell of marketing move. As that’s all it is, lines of code. AI doesn’t think on its own, doesn’t create and definitely doesn’t feel. But unfortunately, AI landed in just the right society to thrive, but that’s another can of worms for some other time.
But to get back into topic, replacing humans with AI and what would happen if it comes to be. Although it might seem this way right now, and more so in the field of translation, believing that translators can be replaced by a machine would be an oversimplification of this career.
Every professional translator knows that translating is more than simply expressing the sense of words in another language, which is as far as AI goes right now. Behind each text, as small or big as it might be, there’s a myriad of factors—cultural, stylistic, technical, etc—that will always require a human touch.
It should suffice to grab any book, more so if it’s translated from another language, to realize the indispensable work of human translators. Take the following fragment as an example:
“I exist.’ In thousands of agonies—I exist. I’m tormented on the rack—but I exist! Though I sit alone in a pillar—I exist! I see the sun, and if I don’t see the sun, I know it’s there. And there’s a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there.”- The Brothers Karamazov, translated from Russian.
But it’s not all bad news. Machine translation can be of help as long as it is used for the right reasons and not with the idea in mind that it will do all of a translator’s work. There’s definitely much to take and much to learn from these tools, and they can be quite impressive!
At Barbier, we believe in the need of human intervention at every step of the translation process and in the irreplaceability of translators in the long run. With every translation we do, we pour all of our knowledge, research, care for the client and the target audience and that will never be replaced.
Leave a Reply