Machine translation is free; but is it up to snuff, or do you get what you pay for?

SAECULII Y.K. (Tokyo, Japan) every four years runs an experiment to determine if machines translation (MT) is capable of producing quality, professional Japanese translation. Read more about that here

The last experiment slated for 2019 was a bust! This is unfortunate because it seems that sometime around this time machine translation achieved something akin to -but not quite- the singularity!

Dawn of an Era – Artificial Intelligence Powered Machines

It’s 2023.

This year’s experiment comes on the back of artificial intelligence (AI), large language learning models (LLM), and deep neural networks (DNN) – Buzz words that add a measure of spice to the project!

Microsoft Translator, which is powered with deep neural networks, statistical machine translation, bitext word alignment and language modeling, was used for this round of experimentation.

Machine Translation Experiment Methodology

We took the following passage from the business article As Kindle Fire Faces Critics, Remedies Are Promised (Yahoo!, 2011-12-14):

The Kindle Fire, Amazon’s heavily promoted tablet, is less than a blazing success with many of its early users.

We ran this passage through machine translation for:

1. English-to-Japanese Translation (i.e., translate to get Japanese text), then
2. Japanese-to-English Translation (i.e., reverse translate back to English text).

Why do we reverse the translation?

The thinking is that if machine translation is any good -efficacy- the reverse translation should be the same, or very similar, to the original English passage. This approach will help folks that do not speak Japanese determine for themselves just how good machine translation really is.

Does Machine Translation Produce Professional Japanese Translation?

Read on.

Step 1: English-to-Japanese Translation
First, we translate the English passage to get Japanese text.

This is what your Japanese target audience see.

Step 2: Japanese-to-English Translation
Next, we reverse translate the Japanese text back into English text.

If machine translation produces professional quality translation, we should get the original English text, or something pretty close, right?

Folks, we finally have progress! This is a

Technology that has moved beyond gibberish, it’s a tool with utility for “gisting.”

It would now be appropriate for machine translation vendors with these results to “tout” an 85% accuracy rate. However, let’s talk about that other 15%. There are two issues with this AI powered machine translation:

1. Importantly, Lack of Context
   “Touted” implies an attempt to sell (something), typically by a direct or persistent approach. That is, the nuance of the term is a “pitch, hard sell”. (Unsurprisingly, in American English it is defined as to “offer racing tips for a share of any resulting winnings.”)
   “Promote”, in the original text, implies to encourage people to like, buy, use, do, or support something. That is, the nuance of the term is “advertising, soft sell”. Indeed, while numbers are hard to come by Amazon most certainly spent an enormous amount on promoting the Kindle Fire. For example, Amazon discounted units $10~20 with 50,000 sold a day in October 2011 amounting to advertising costs of $ 500,000 ~ 1,000,000 a day. Context gives us perspective…
2. Sadly, Lack of Creativity
   The original phrase makes a wonderful play on the words “kindle”, “fire” and “blazing” — Creativity at its best! The translated text is painfully bland substituting “blazing” for “huge”. Given how the technology works -which predicts the most statistically likely word in a sentence- it’s designed to churn out average content. Is translation to become a wasteland of average content?

Context and creativity -that 15%- is the very essence of what professional translation is. The rest is translation wannabes and…gisting!

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About the Author
Ivan Vandermerwe is the CEO of SAECULII YK, the owner of Japan based Translation Service Tokyo Visit SAECULII for the latest professional case studies, articles and news on Japanese Translation Services

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