"Can AI Replace Human Translators? A Booming Tech Sector Raises Questions About the Future of Publishing" As the tech industry continues to boom, it's having an unexpected impact on the world of publishing: translation jobs are being disrupted by artificial intelligence. Literary translators like Yoann Gentric are facing a new challenge, as machine translation engines like DeepL - which has been shown to outperform Google Translate in accuracy assessments - are increasingly capable of rendering complex texts into other languages. But Gentric's experiment with DeepL raises an intriguing question: could AI be the solution to a problem it's also creating? With the global demand for translated literature on the rise, it's unclear how long human translators will be needed - or if AI will eventually take over this role altogether.
A booming tech sector has disrupted translation jobs in publishing – but they could be needed for a while longer yetIn February 2022, while he was plugging away at rendering the US writer Dana Spiotta’s novel Wayward into French, the literary translator Yoann Gentric decided he needed a bit of light relief. He would test whether AI could put him out of work.Gentric had been grappling with a short non-verbal sentence that described the book’s protagonist’s feelings upon opening a window: “Bright, sharp night air, bracing.” He put the prompt into DeepL, a neural-network-powered machine translation engine that regularly outperforms Google Translate in accuracy assessments. Continue reading...
