The real question to ask about AI/MT

Greetings, Training for Translators readers! I hope you’re all doing well, and happy March!

First off, I wanted to alert you to a Chinese<>English interpreting class being offered by my friend and colleague Rony Gao. You cannot go wrong with Rony’s offerings, and he’s leading a Chinese<>English consecutive interpreting class, online, starting March 18. Here are the details (not an affiliate deal).

Next, on to this week’s topic: What’s the real question we need to be asking about artificial intelligence and machine translation (AI/MT)? This topic came to me when I responded to Joachim Lépine’s LinkedIn post about whether AI is a threat to human translators. It’s an excellent question, Joe gave excellent examples, and it sparked a lively discussion! Here’s my take:

• What’s different about the current AI/MT boom, when we’ve been leveraging technology in the form of translation memory for a really long time? Everyone knows about it. You know how you get the best information from clients? Being copied in on an e-mail that you weren’t supposed to see. This happened to me a while ago (pre-AI boom) when one of my direct clients accidentally included me on an e-mail saying to a colleague, “I think that the translator has a way to compare last year’s version of the document with this year’s, and then she only translates the new stuff.” This client had no idea what translation memory was; he described it pretty accurately, but the point being that, just as many of us probably don’t know or care about the details of the software used by our accountants, web designers, graphic designers, etc., many translation clients (and here I’m talking about direct clients, obviously agencies knew about TM) and the general public had no clue what translation memory was. Things are really different now, because everyone knows about the new technology; I’ve even had clients (and I’m talking labor unions, not hard-core word people) tell me that they use DeepL for informal translations.
• The issue is, most of us are asking the wrong question. We fixate (and I mean, fixate) on AI/MT’s real and perceived weaknesses, of which there are many. It doesn’t get cultural contexts, humor, subtlety, political references, literary references, sarcasm, and the list goes on. I had a client ask me to review a translation in which their MT engine “translated” the name of the Swiss town “Aubonne” as “Augood.” Like, where to even begin? I honestly believe that most professional translators can identify an AI/MT-generated translation in about two sentences.
• The problem is, our fixation on the quality of the translation is, in my opinion, the wrong way to go about this. The real question (which I posted in response to Joe’s question) is, how do we find clients who perceive this difference and are willing to pay for it, or who have other reasons for not wanting to use AI/MT, and are willing to pay for those?

I definitely have clients who have moved to AI/MT-generated translations that are then edited by humans. I don’t do machine translation post-editing, not because I have anything against it, but because I find it mind-numbing. And in some cases, I actually don’t think the client made the wrong decision. If you just want to know, “What does this French thing say in English?” DeepL in many cases does a decent job.

But, I have an equal number of clients who ask me, “You don’t use AI-generated translations, do you??” They ask this for various reasons:

• They’re afraid, probably correctly, that confidential documents uploaded to an online AI/MT system may end up on the AI provider’s servers. I know that the paid versions of most MT engines promise not to do this, but I still think that it freaks clients out, particularly in certain sectors.I translate for a couple of international family law firms, and here we’re talking about evidence documents that contain people’s most personal information: the details of why their kids were taken away, transcripts of phone calls between them and their abusive ex-spouse, the details of their investment portfolio and how it might be divided in a divorce, etc. etc. Those clients want as few eyes as possible on their documents.
• They, too, are word people. “Clients who care” are the best clients, right?? It’s true that every profession has its thing. I’m consistently surprised by interpreting clients who tell me (not being sassy, just being honest), that they don’t perceive any audio quality difference between someone using a laptop microphone and someone using a headset. Whereas to interpreters, this is a huge thing; the other day, my boothmate actually said to the client, “That’s funny, because I can even tell the brand of headset you’re using from the warm tone of the audio: it’s a Jabra, right?.” (And she was correct!) We can’t expect all clients to care about words the way we care about words, but lots of clients do care.
• They’ve been burned in the past. Another “best client” category is clients who want a personal relationship with a translator (whether you use AI/MT or not) because they’ve been burned by a different model. I don’t hate agencies, I actually would love to translate for more agencies if more agencies would pay my rates, and I think agencies fill an important role in the language services market. And it’s also true that clients who want consistency, a single point of contact, someone who’s going to know the right questions to ask and the right advice to give, are better off with a freelancer. As an example, I was translating some materials for one of my French university clients (they have “international programs” that are taught in English, into which they accept students who speak zero French). And I asked them, had they thought about any services or programs for their international students’ parents? Parent relations are pretty much nonexistent in the French university system, and I think they thought I was joking, until I gave them the example of my own daughter’s university, which hosts welcome events for parents, a family weekend, and maintains a parent Facebook group. This is a high-priced private university, and I told them that many American parents funding their kid’s education would be looking for this type of thing. AI doesn’t know this!

There are lots of pros and cons to AI, but I honestly think that, “Is there a difference between AI and human translation?” (yes, of course there is!!) is the wrong question, and that we’re better served by asking, “How do we find clients who perceive this difference and are willing to pay for it?”

Corinne McKay (classes@trainingfortranslators.com) is the founder of Training for Translators, and has been a full-time freelancer since 2002. She holds a Master of Conference Interpreting from Glendon College, is an ATA-certified French to English translator, and is Colorado court-certified for French interpreting. If you enjoy her posts, consider joining the Training for Translators mailing list!