As I finished the third leg of a five-leg translation ultra-marathon today, what struck me was just how often we (the humans) rearrange the connective tissue in a text so that it is readable, cohesive, and, therefore, engaging, yet manages to retain the original intended meaning and purpose. The gangly bits sticking out of a so-called automatic translation (a literal translation from many Latin languages, as it happens, and as you are well aware, of what began life in English as "machine translation") are nowhere to be seen. This is because the human is not automatic: he or she has years of thought behind every deft victory of functional equivalence and a sure-footed knowingness that the spat-out word strings of automatic piglets wearing lipstick cannot hope to match, no matter how much "compute" is thrown at them.
Aren't you glad I did not bring up the polished turd trope? Oh, but I will now! I have a Finnish friend whose Facebook posts in Finnish would be translated into Portuguese because of my FB settings at the time. What a mess! (I could tell that English had been the bridging language in that FI-PT process.) Sometimes, she would come back later and post her own translation in competent English (her L2). Suffice to say that the FB instant trashlation was way off the mark more often than not. Sure, AI and LLMs have made everything look a little more, er, polished, but they are not texts I care to read. They irk me something terrible. (I wrote that last sentence like that on purpose, btw.)
I interpreted something recently about using AI translations which passed through English on the way from their target language to their destination. This, not surprisingly irked the francophones in the room something terrible.
I, too, am a word-girl, words mean things and I pick them very carefully.
I also spent many years as an American Sign Language Interpreter and know the struggles of picking the right words in English to match the ASL and the right ASL to match the English, interpreting words into pictures and pictures into words. So I totally feel you on that (that’s another thing altogether, idioms!)
However, Substack is a global thing and without some type of translation tool, I would be lost 🐝
As I finished the third leg of a five-leg translation ultra-marathon today, what struck me was just how often we (the humans) rearrange the connective tissue in a text so that it is readable, cohesive, and, therefore, engaging, yet manages to retain the original intended meaning and purpose. The gangly bits sticking out of a so-called automatic translation (a literal translation from many Latin languages, as it happens, and as you are well aware, of what began life in English as "machine translation") are nowhere to be seen. This is because the human is not automatic: he or she has years of thought behind every deft victory of functional equivalence and a sure-footed knowingness that the spat-out word strings of automatic piglets wearing lipstick cannot hope to match, no matter how much "compute" is thrown at them.
Aren't you glad I did not bring up the polished turd trope? Oh, but I will now! I have a Finnish friend whose Facebook posts in Finnish would be translated into Portuguese because of my FB settings at the time. What a mess! (I could tell that English had been the bridging language in that FI-PT process.) Sometimes, she would come back later and post her own translation in competent English (her L2). Suffice to say that the FB instant trashlation was way off the mark more often than not. Sure, AI and LLMs have made everything look a little more, er, polished, but they are not texts I care to read. They irk me something terrible. (I wrote that last sentence like that on purpose, btw.)
Thanks for your insights Allison.
I interpreted something recently about using AI translations which passed through English on the way from their target language to their destination. This, not surprisingly irked the francophones in the room something terrible.
I do so love your verbal alacrity. ;-)
I, too, am a word-girl, words mean things and I pick them very carefully.
I also spent many years as an American Sign Language Interpreter and know the struggles of picking the right words in English to match the ASL and the right ASL to match the English, interpreting words into pictures and pictures into words. So I totally feel you on that (that’s another thing altogether, idioms!)
However, Substack is a global thing and without some type of translation tool, I would be lost 🐝
Good points, very well made. And I do like a nice idiom!