GenAI: Is It a Real Challenge for the Translation Industry?
By: Muhammad Hamza Posted on Thu, 15-08-2024
By: Muhammad Hamza Posted on Thu, 15-08-2024
Is generative AI a friend or foe for the translation industry? You might have heard this debatable question several times. Ever got the answer? Well, this read is all about analyzing the impact of AI on the translation industry. Let’s examine the key challenges of using AI for translation and the benefits it offers to see if AI is really a challenge or a helpful tool to make the localization process better, faster, and more productive.
The translation industry has been the cornerstone of global communication for centuries, bridging linguistic and cultural gaps. In today’s globalized world, the need for accurate and culturally appropriate translation has become higher than ever. Companies of all sizes, from small businesses to multinational corporations need to incorporate translation services in their systems or must associate with a professional language services company. However, the industry is at a crossroads, providing profitable benefits while facing unprecedented disruption from technological advancements.
Generative AI is a subset of artificial intelligence. It is capable of creating new content using automated text generation functionality. The connection between translation and AI isn’t new. Starting from simple machine translation (MT), it evolved to neural machine translation (NMT) and now has emerged as a powerful force with the potential to revolutionize the translation landscape. Gen AI offers exciting possibilities for improving efficiency, accuracy, and accessibility in translation with its ability to process and generate human-like content.
GenAI's ability to understand language patterns enables it to learn the intricacies of particular cultures. It can generate alternate phrases, idioms, and even slogan variations that are perceived as real by a target market. Visually, GenAI-powered technologies recognize imagery that may require replacement and recommend viable alternatives. This is important because localization includes more than just words; pictures communicate information and feelings that may not be directly translated across cultures.
While the potential benefits of Gen AI for the translation industry are undeniable, it also raises significant challenges and concerns.
Let’s explore the complex relationship between the translation industry and Gen AI, examining both the opportunities and threats it presents.
While most translators and translation companies think of Gen AI as a challenge for the translation industry, it is crucial to analyze the reasons closely. These include:
Translation is a huge industry experiencing significant growth. According to stats, in 2022, the value of the global language services market was $60.68 billion and is projected to reach $96.21 billion in 2032, with a CAGR of 5.94%. The stats clearly show that translation is a growing industry with no full-stop expected anytime soon. However, the fear of job displacement is the main concern of many people who believe that advanced technology based on AI will replace human translators entirely.
When it comes to translation, maintaining quality is one of the biggest and main concerns for translators. Using machine translations will indeed exploit the quality and struggles of handling nuances, cultural context, and specialized terminology. But MT is the basic translation technology that is only used for simple translation. The technology has evolved a lot with time, and now we have the finest version of AI available with the capability to handle intricacies and complexities better than the previous technologies used, like MT or NMT.
Issues like data privacy, copyright infringement, and the potential for misuse of AI-generated content raise ethical concerns. Many AI models are trained on massive datasets and store the previously used information to produce more and better results. This raises questions about the legality of using copyrighted works to create new content. When an AI generates content based on copyrighted material, this creates legal uncertainties for both AI developers and content creators.
Overreliance on AI could make the industry vulnerable to technological failures or changes. Unwanted system failures can disrupt operations, leading to inaccurate and discriminatory translations. Moreover, the rapid evolution of AI can make it challenging for businesses to inherit the latest technologies in their regulatory systems and maintain their competitive edge.
Human vs. machine translation has now long gone a story. Now both technology and human expertise are collaborating to produce translation solutions more appropriate than ever. With the arrival of Gen AI, a significant upgrade can be seen in the performance of human translators.
A strong connection has now developed between Gen AI and the translation industry that results in accurate and precise translations of complex and lengthy documents within a short time.
Let’s delve deeper into how Gen AI is connected to the translation industry:
Machine translation (MT) isn’t something new. It has been around for decades. In 2006, a statistical machine translation was introduced by Google in its finest shape with the name of Google Translate. The program was designed to translate multiple forms of text and media, such as words, phrases, and web pages.
Then, after almost a decade in 2015, the translation industry saw another innovation with the invention of neural machine translation. NMT is an automated translation technology based on artificial intelligence. It produces results using neural network techniques to predict the likelihood of words in sequence.
The introduction of generative adversarial networks (Generative AI) completely changed the shape of the translation industry. Generative AI is based on the NMT systems. Unlike the previous versions like MT, Gen AI doesn’t need manual upgradation and produces accurate and culturally appropriate translations. As Gen AI is trained in specific domains like legal or medical, it produces more human-like, natural-sounding translations.
Translation is a lengthy and complex process that takes time. Gen AI helps translators with data preparation by cleaning, filtering, and formatting large datasets, which saves translators time and effort. Now, translators do not have to spend much time on terminology extraction as AI can identify and extract key terms from source and target languages, ensuring consistency.
Moreover, managing translation memory has now become easier with Gen AI. It automatically updates and manages translation memories for efficient reuse.
For content creation, AI can expedite the work of copywriters and transcreators by analyzing pre-existing materials and suggesting modifications for various cultural contexts. Large text volumes for localization can be handled by GenAI-powered programs, which produce concise summaries in several languages.
This provides translators and project managers with an invaluable overview of the source material. It allows them to make better-informed judgments and allocate resources more efficiently.
Quality assurance is a significant part of any translation project that requires translators to proofread the content various times to find loopholes and mistakes. With the help of AI, translators can now easily identify potential errors, mistakes, inconsistencies, and typos in translated content.
Additionally, AI assists in maintaining the quality of the content across languages by ensuring consistent tone, style, and terminology throughout the translated content. It also utilizes user feedback to improve the translation quality over time.
With Neural Machine Translation (NMT) technologies, GenAI dramatically improves machine translation. Because NMT is trained on a large database of human-translated content, it outperforms previous MT techniques. As a result, algorithms are able to comprehend subtle linguistic nuances, produce more natural word selections, and recognize context.
Thus, localization teams get more accurate translations that significantly cut down the time and effort required for post-editing.
The future of the translation industry depends on a peaceful collaboration between people and artificial intelligence. By accepting this collaboration, the industry has the potential to achieve new levels of precision, efficiency, and creativity. Gen AI will perform ordinary tasks, freeing up human translators to focus on the more creative and complicated aspects of their employment. As a result, translation services will be more accessible, inexpensive, and high-quality.
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