Halfway through 2024, suggesting AI as the year’s buzzword is beyond cliché. Still, the headlines just keep coming, barely keeping up with the pace of new product releases and demos.
Translation is one of the most-referenced professions in media coverage of AI’s potential impact. It begs the question: What does mainstream media — outside of the language industry bubble — have to say about AI translation?
In a non-exhaustive review of mainstream English-language media write-ups of AI between January and July 2024, a few patterns emerged.
Machine translation — and more specifically, neural machine translation — is often (fairly) cited, in quick overviews of the field, as a turning point in the evolution of translation. Another trademark of these articles is the use of the term “lost in translation,” particularly in titles, followed by frequent allusions to the fictional Babel Fish.
More generally, media opinions on AI translation can be grouped into one of the following four categories:
Humans Are Still Superior (For Now)
Approximately one-quarter of the articles surveyed came to the conclusion that humans are indispensable to the translation process. These pieces shone a light on AI translation’s drawbacks and limitations, such as hallucinations and inconsistent quality across language pairs, as mentioned in Politico’s January 2024 piece, “A red flag for AI translation”.
Some publications, such as WIRED, expressed concern about the potential societal implications of unchecked AI translation.
Others noted the often overlooked areas in which professionals are necessary: texts requiring creativity, cultural sensitivity, and a sense of nuance, as a recent NPR article explained. Those factors contribute to the general impression that literary translation is one vertical where AI struggles to compete with humans.
As a February 2024 PCMag comparison of Google Translate vs. ChatGPT concluded, “[n]one of the AI chatbots were a one-to-one replacement for a fluent speaker.”
Sound the Alarm: Translators Are In Danger
Over 40% of the coverage, however, treated the death of translators’ livelihoods as a foregone conclusion.
In February 2024, Le Monde declared literary translators “early casualties of the AI revolution.”
The Next Web, sharing results from a survey of the UK’s Society of Authors, announced that “almost four in 10 translators” said they had already lost work due to AI. The subtitle of the April 2024 article: “As machine translation improves, demand for human translators is plummeting.”
The Guardian, writing about the same survey, said the findings show AI is proving a “major threat to the work of translators.”
Language learning platform Duolingo’s layoffs in early 2024 were also featured in several articles, with The Washington Post calling it one of the most high-profile instances to date of a company replacing human workers with AI.
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AI translation is an especially hot topic within the world of Japanese anime and manga localization, leading to debates among fans and translators. At least one outlet even claimed that some companies have used AI to replace translators who injected their own political beliefs into dubs.
Perhaps most dramatically, The Atlantic posited in March 2024 that AI translation may spell “the end of foreign language education” — essentially by killing the need and demand for human translation.
According to the article, “[w]ithin a few years, AI translation may become so commonplace and frictionless that billions of people take for granted the fact that the emails they receive, videos they watch, and albums they listen to were originally produced in a language other than their native one.”
AI + Humans = Optimal Translation
One-fifth of mainstream journalists and news outlets are apparently ready for cyborgs. Their take on AI translation might be described as “neutral,” balancing advantages and disadvantages, and ultimately seeing such “teamwork” as ideal.
An Entrepreneur article, for instance, suggests that this collaboration will preclude competition in a conflict often framed as “human vs. machine.” Instead, AI will handle big jobs while human translators ensure accuracy and cultural appropriateness.
While ScreenRant warned that popular anime streaming platform CrunchyRoll’s experimentation with AI subtitling “could set a dangerous precedent,” it went on to emphasize that AI, though useful for speed, may not understand cultural context, and still needs a human touch.
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Translators? What Translators?
The remaining media coverage — about 15% — falls into an unexpected category: news that pertains to translators, but does not actually mention translators.
The noteworthy developments behind each article could be innocuous or positive, such as 3,000 Paris public transport workers receiving AI-supported translation devices to help them assist hundreds of thousands of non-French-speaking visitors expected during the summer Olympics.
But they also might be negative. When WIRED reported on a German speech by Adolf Hitler that went viral after it was translated into English using AI technology, startup ElevenLabs found itself in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons.
Strikingly, translators seem to barely figure into online gaming platform Roblox’s AI-powered translation mode, which allows players to communicate via texts translated in real-time. The numbers are staggering: 70m users in 180 countries send an average of 2.4bn messages daily.
TradingView noted that Roblox brought on humans — referred to as evaluators, rather than translators — to review “popular and trending terms” within Roblox.
It is possible, of course, that the potential impact on current translators is not mentioned here because, prior to this development, these messages would simply go untranslated.
Indeed, context — the essential foundation of any translator’s work — is crucial to making sense of how translators are represented, if at all, in mainstream media.
