Poll: Where can human translators offer the most irreplaceable value in the age of AI? Thread poster: ProZ.com Staff
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This forum topic is for the discussion of the poll question "Where can human translators offer the most irreplaceable value in the age of AI?".
This poll was originally submitted by WordAnt. View the poll results »
| | | | | Advanced Source Content Optimization | Jul 22 |
Flagging sustantive errors in the source I would say.
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Certified and sworn translations...
| | | | Zea_Mays 
Italy
Local time: 07:08
English to German
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I'm involved in a project where an agency reverted their experimental AI approach and opted for human translation for quality reasons, a pure QED situation.
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| In subtitling and transcription. | Jul 22 |
AI may perform well with clear, standard speech, but it still struggles with strong regional accents, dialects, overlapping speakers, poor audio and cultural nuances.
Human professionals bring the listening skills, contextual understanding and editorial judgment needed to produce reliable subtitles and transcripts.
As it happens with translation, subtitling is not simply speech recognition, it is interpretation under constraints.
| | | | | The question sounds desperate | Jul 22 |
And it's asked from a wrong point of view. Human translators are irreplaceable because they're humans. The problem is that 99,99% people are unable to understand it. They're genuinely convinced that artificial imbecillence is a kind of a divine spirit that can think and understand things, knows all the languages, all the answers and all the questions. They're also unaware of how it works and unable to properly assess the quality of what it displays. The artificial god says so, so it MUST be true... See more And it's asked from a wrong point of view. Human translators are irreplaceable because they're humans. The problem is that 99,99% people are unable to understand it. They're genuinely convinced that artificial imbecillence is a kind of a divine spirit that can think and understand things, knows all the languages, all the answers and all the questions. They're also unaware of how it works and unable to properly assess the quality of what it displays. The artificial god says so, so it MUST be true, full stop. They even believe it chats with them. The proper question we need to ask ourselves is: is the industry making us compete with a string of electric pulses actually worth it? I said 'no' and chose to give up translating - or, actually, MTPEs as this is what this profession turned into - by the end of this year. It's not easy at my age, but it's the best I can do. Let them feed their contracts, medical records and other confidential writs to servers located hell knows where and accessed by hell knows whom. Good luck, I don't care any more. ▲ Collapse
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I recently had an unusual experience: an agency that forbids translators from using AI, GT, DeepL and MT, but then mainly sends them MTPE jobs. Is this a paradoxical "circular economy"?
| | | | Mario Chávez
United States
Local time: 01:08
English to Spanish
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| Excellent writing skills | Jul 22 |
Writing, you ask? Everybody knows how to write. To write superbly in two or three languages, for different kinds of readers and in different specializations, takes many years, decades to master. No LLM (which costs several times what it cost to educate a human being in professional writing) can match that, now or ever.
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Daryo
Local time: 06:08
Serbian to English
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| You could add slang to the list | Jul 22 |
expressisverbis wrote:
AI may perform well with clear, standard speech, but it still struggles with strong regional accents, dialects, overlapping speakers, poor audio and cultural nuances.
Human professionals bring the listening skills, contextual understanding and editorial judgment needed to produce reliable subtitles and transcripts.
As it happens with translation, subtitling is not simply speech recognition, it is interpretation under constraints.
You could add slang [and even le français familier] to the list - the most 'entertaining' translations I've seen came from translators who never lived in the country of the source language and only understand the most formal academic version of the source language. Especially the case with subtitling movie ... From the AI generated subtitles I had to endure few times, AI is about as much useless.
Also, even with 'clear, standard speech' AI can easily the thrown off-balance by the slightest ambiguity, of the kind that wouldn't create any problem for humans with real-life experience. For AI words are most literally 'just words'.
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