BEIJING: Warnings have been sounded that artificial intelligence (AI) could lead to mass layoffs for software developers, finance professionals and customer service agents, among other office workers.
But one area where people still work better than AI is in translation and interpretation, according to China-based researchers, who have found chatbot translators still fall short when it comes to grasping and relaying context and rhetorical nuance.
Despite a jump in machine translation quality in recent years, "human judgement and oversight remain essential, particularly in politically, diplomatically and culturally sensitive settings," the researchers concluded.
For a paper published in the journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, the researchers compared chatbot translations of Chinese speeches at the United Nations to official English-language versions.
The team found "ideological disparities" between how AI and humans do the translating and interpreting.
Despite the AI being given prompts such as the speaker's job title, the year the speech was made, and the social and political backdrop, the researchers found "major differences" in the "contextual understanding and translation strategies" seen when the AI versions were compared to the previous translations.
Among other flaws, AI overused passive constructions in its versions of the speeches while omitting rhetorical flourishes in favour of blander or generic wording that obscured concepts such as responsibility and obligation.
"In translation tasks that require careful attention to cultural meaning and contextual understanding, human interpreters remain indispensable in making informed judgements about interpersonal relationships, rhetorical choices and cultural expression," said Wang Binhua, head of the Centre for English and Additional Languages at Lingnan University in Hong Kong, who carried out the study with Gao Fei of Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications.
Last year, technology giant Microsoft listed interpreters and translators as among those most at risk of job losses over the coming years because of AI, a conclusion reached after an analysis of requests made of the company’s Copilot bot. – dpa
