My Conversations with ChatGPT
Machine Translation (MT) and translations generated by AI have brought about a paradigm shift in the translation industry. The output of MT will continue to improve, especially when associated with clients’ translation memories and human editing. Language Service Providers are adapting and are including MT in their processes, when MT is applicable. While linguists will continue to be essential in the process, their role will shift from that of translators to validators of content generated by MT. At Excel Translations, we wanted to know what AI thinks about all of this and decided to have an open conversation on the matter with ChatGPT. I will regularly publish a question and ChatGPT’s response, uncensored.
QUESTION: 2
When will the quality of MT output be roughly equivalent to that produced by high-performing human translators?
ChatGPT’s response:
Predicting the exact timeline for when machine translation (MT) will reach the level of high-performing human translators is challenging. However, it’s important to note that MT has made significant advancements in recent years and continues to improve rapidly.
The quality of MT output can vary depending on factors such as language pair, domain specificity, and the availability of training data. In some domains and language pairs, MT systems have already achieved levels of quality that are comparable to or even surpassing human translations for certain types of content. However, in more complex and nuanced domains, such as legal or literary translation, high-performing human translators still generally outperform current MT systems.
The pace of progress in MT research and development, driven by advancements in machine learning and natural language processing, suggests that the quality of MT will continue to improve. Although it’s difficult to provide an exact timeframe, some experts predict that MT systems could reach a level of quality on par with high-performing human translators within the next decade or two.
It’s worth mentioning that even when MT reaches a comparable level of quality, human translators will still have an essential role in the translation process. Human expertise, cultural understanding, and the ability to interpret context and nuances will continue to be valuable assets in ensuring accurate and contextually appropriate translations.
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