Is Machine Translation Possible? Well, yeah, but…
Sorry about the lack of posts and the slow server this week. I’ve been recovering from a week in London and returning from the amazing Global Voices Summit, (about which I have more to blog). Meanwhile, back on the bandwagon…
Interesting post by Ryan Coleman over at Found in Translation: Machine Translation – ever ready for prime time?
At the end of the day, our goal as technologists shouldn’t be to replace the translator - they’re an essential part of the process - but rather build and create tools that automate the mundane so they can focus on the exceptions. In the end I think it means more efficient, higher quality translation for all of us.
I certainly agree with that sentiment. The question of whether “real” machine translation is possible is equivalent, I think, to whether “real” artificial intelligence is possible. In other words, when somebody finally makes machine translation work flawlessly, we will have necessarily reached the era of “OMG MY COMPUTER IS ALIVE!”
And by that point we’ll be dealing with problems far more complex and difficult to imagine than mere translation. (Brain uploading, anyone?)
And, anyway, back in the now, the variety of machine translation that’s actually working well these days—statistical translation—is already a sort of “mechanical turk.” It only works because human translators have given it something to imitate. Human translators are still in the loop, even though it’s called “machine” translation.
That doesn’t change the fact that there just won’t be enough financial and personal resources dedicated to the problem to build machine translation systems for a significant number of pairs of languages.
Do I think that real machine translation is possible? Yep, I do. But I also think that real AI is possible, and that the two developments will be more or less contemporaneous. And when we hit AI, fuhgeddaboutit, all bets are off.
And another thing—couldn’t Amazon have come up with something a name for their service that’s a little more tasteful than “mechanical Turk”? Good grief.
