its all about the readers Mikel L Forcada Universitat dAlacant Spain Prompsit Language Engineering Elx Spain European Association for Machine Translation All translation is communication ID: 541615
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Slide1
Professional translation in a pre-Singularity world(it’s all about the readers)
Mikel L.
Forcada
Universitat
d’Alacant
(Spain)
Prompsit
Language Engineering (
Elx
, Spain)
European Association for Machine TranslationSlide2
All translation is communication
Getting the target-language reader to understand the message, and to (re)act as expected —the
purpose
of the translation— implies
getting in their shoes
:
expectations
beliefs
feelings
cultural context
social context
…
Can a machine
get in your shoes
without a model of
you
?Slide3
Professional translation
Translators are professionals that are good at that,
but variably so
.
They use:
approximate, often
intuitive models of readers
a reasonable understanding of
purpose
:
sometimes explicitly formulated
often gleaned / read between the lines / guessed
the customer often has only an approximate idea
Fulfillment
of purpose? →often a rudimentary approximation: customers
coming back for moreSlide4
Machine translation
Current machine translation
does not have explicit access to a model of the reader
…
… nor feedback from that model or negotiation with it.
It is therefore
hard to code purpose
(as it includes the reaction of readers).
Current approach (neural, statistical MT): producing
text that works
by
mimicking good references
(references that presumably worked well in the past)
.Slide5
But who reads raw machine translation?
Professional translators
: most likely to
postedit
it.
Purpose
: being easy to
postedit
into text which fulfils the customer’s purpose.Ordinary people: to make sense of a text across a language barrier. Purpose: being easy to understand as is.The requirements of both tasks are different!But ordinary people get used to dealing with noisy, non-native, non-grammatical content. MT’ed content is not an exception.
Readers of machine translationSlide6
PT already being replaced?
Professional translators are
already being replaced
(no need to wait for a Kurzweilian singularity) in some applications.
In fact,
they have never been
(and will never be) p
art of some applications
(e.g. translated web browsing).Slide7
Implicit modelling of readers
MT can get better at using rudimentary ways to guess purpose (which means modelling readers implicitly).
It may replace PT
where intricate reader modelling is not necessary
as behaviour can be taken for granted:
E.g. translated instructions that will be followed by an
obedient reader
that has decided or has been instructed to do so.
In the future, it may actually negotiate and interact with readers to build an approximate model.Slide8
And now, back to the original question…
So, will all translators be replaced before the Singularity?
MT will get much better at implicitly modelling some types of readers / reading situations: PT already gradually being replaced.
MT still has a long way to go when modelling some types of readers / reading situations. PT still needed there.