Ask ChatGPT – September 22, 2023

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 59:

Will the speed of machine translation depend on the language?

Chat GPT’s Response:

Yes, the speed of machine translation can depend on the languages involved. Machine translation speed can be influenced by several factors, and the complexity of the languages being translated is one of them. Here are some ways in which language complexity can affect translation speed:

1. Language Pair Complexity: Translating between certain language pairs can be more computationally intensive than others. For instance, languages with significantly different grammar structures or writing systems may require more processing time.
2. Language Resources: Availability of language resources, such as parallel corpora and pre-trained models, varies by language. Languages with more resources tend to have faster and more accurate translations because the machine translation system has more data to learn from.
3. Language Morphology: Languages with complex morphology, where words can change significantly based on their role in a sentence, may require more processing time to generate accurate translations.
4. Language Ambiguity: Some languages are more context-dependent and ambiguous, which can make translation more challenging and may require additional time for disambiguation.
5. Language Length: Languages with longer average word lengths or sentence structures may take longer to process compared to languages with shorter, more concise expressions.
6. Language Technology Development: The state of development of language technology and machine translation models can also vary by language. More widely spoken languages often receive more attention and resources from developers, resulting in faster translation systems.

In general, the speed of machine translation depends on a combination of factors, including the complexity of the languages involved, the quality and size of training data, the efficiency of the translation model, and the hardware used for processing. As machine translation technology continues to advance, the speed differences between languages are likely to decrease, but some variations may still exist due to linguistic and resource-related challenges.