The following are three translations of the first stanza of Shakespeare’s sonnet 102 . A canonical version of a Spanish poet; the other, a more modern proposal by a Latin American writer and one in charge of artificial intelligence.
“My love grows stronger, if its appearance is weak; / and even if it shows it less, I have not stopped loving you; / Merchandise is the public love whose excellence / the language of its owner proclaims anywhere.”, says one .
“My love is strengthened even if it seems weaker;/ I do not love less even if I show my love less;/ That love is merchandise, whose rich appreciation,/ the owner publishes everywhere with his tongue.”, maintains the second.
And, the third, affirms that “Although weak in appearance, my love is very strong,/ and I do not love less, just because it seems so./ It is mercantile love, the one whose high esteem,/ everywhere is proclaimed by the language of its author.”
It would seem easy to distinguish which of these versions are the work of a human being and which of an artificial intelligence . After all, it is poetry, the most difficult to translate . At a time when newspaper articles abound that reflect both the fascination and the fear that artificial intelligence inspires, translations , that minefield of editorial work , seems perhaps the most propitious area for its use and for, incidentally, reduce costs and get rid of the everlasting complaints from translators .
For Jorge Carrión , co-author with Taller Estampa and GPT of Electromagnetic fields. Theories and practices of artificial writing , translation programs are “very useful tools for obtaining a first version of scripts, technical or popular books, as well as essays without literary ambition. But then human supervision is needed . They can’t translate high literature yet , but it is likely that they will soon be able to.”
Pía Gepeto (the name we have given to ChatGPT for her participation in this report) seems to be of the same opinion: “Automatic translation programs have come a long way in recent years, and in many cases they can produce literary translations that are accurate and understandable . . However, literary translation is a very specialized field and often these programs are not capable of capturing the deeper meaning of language , including nuances, puns, double meanings and metaphors, key elements of literature.”
For Ernest Folch , editor of Navona and Folch&Folch, it is only “vaguely possible to translate very technical and very mechanical texts with AI programs, something like a medical prescription or a traffic ticket , and even so I am skeptical. A translation, like any creative work, needs things like emotion, sensitivity and good judgment, all virtues that a machine can never have.”
Magdalena Palmer , winner of the XXIV Ángel Crespo Translation Prize, also thinks that AI translation “is a useful tool for technical translations, but its application to literature is a mistake. And always, even if they are technical translations, they have to be reviewed and supervised by highly experienced human eyes to be able to detect and correct serious errors. As for literary texts, there are so many factors that influence the decision on how to translate a phrase, an expression, a metaphor, a play on words, the register of dialogues, the way a character speaks, cultural biases , etc., that I don’t see as possible without seriously diminishing the quality of the text”.
reduce costs
Even so, he sees it as possible that “some publishers try to get us translators to become proofreaders of translations made using AI. By paying us less, of course. The application of AI to literary translation will aim to reduce costs, not improve the quality of the translation”.
For the translator Cristina Macía , translating literature using a machine is “unfeasible” and “all attempts have ended in catastrophe”, although, if it were ever possible, imagine a future in which four highly valued translators remain in charge of luxury editions sold with slogans such as “100% manual translation!”, almost as if it were an ecological product without additives.
victims
In any case, although most of the reactions of other publishers consulted oscillate between disbelief and shock, in the gossip of the industry there is a whispered mention of a publisher that translates its less demanding books through software and then proofreads and edits them . launches to the market If it were true, it would be a bit like that saying about witches: books translated by AI don’t exist, but there are, there are. And its first victims would be the translators, but also the readers.
In the gossip of the industry, a publisher is mentioned in a low voice that translates its less demanding books using software
For the writer Patricio Pron , “not all publishers are sensitive to the fact that a good translator is a commercial claim for their books, as well as a guarantee of quality; those publishers pay little or very little to their translators, and the fact that from now on they have virtually no pay is great news for them, but not for those who will have to compete with those digital slaves in semi-slavery conditions or, of course , , for readers, who will be paying for worthless books.”
Distinction
For Carrión, the moment in which it will be impossible to distinguish whether the translation was done with neurons or with bits will undoubtedly arrive, “if it hasn’t already arrived and we haven’t realized it”. The nice Pía Gepeto says that “it is possible that in the future machine translation technology could reach a level where it is difficult to distinguish between a translation carried out by an AI and one carried out by a human being . However, this will largely depend on the quality and complexity of the literary work in question, as well as the level of cultural and historical knowledge that is required to fully understand the work. At that point, says Pron, “it won’t matter much anymore who translated a book or who wrote it; for that reason, it will not be necessary to read it either.
Perhaps the great danger hidden in automatic translations is that, at some point, they will become the standard of quality
In a recent article in the New York Times titled “The False Promise of ChatGPT,” Noam Chomsky argues that the great fallacy of AI stems from the fact that “the human mind is not a ponderous pattern-matching statistical engine, devouring hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolates from the most logical reply within a conversation or the most probable answer to a scientific question”, but “a surprisingly efficient and elegant system that works with small amounts of information and that does not seek to infer crude correlations between data but rather generate explanations” (the translation is mine).
neoliberal strategy
Publisher Ernest Folch would probably agree. For him, we are facing a fanaticism of technology and a neoliberal strategy to save costs. “ They want us to believe this stupidity that machines can also replace and even improve our brain. And the truth is that a translation, like any creative work, needs things like emotion, sensitivity and good judgment, all virtues that a machine can never have. There is nothing further from literature than a machine, and I honestly don’t believe that there can be literary translations, much less decent and intelligent literary works that can be produced by AI. So far the only big find of the AI is the name, which gives it an appearance of what it is not. It may be useful for many things, but definitely not for anything to do with creation.
In any case, perhaps the great danger that machine translations hide is that, at some point, they will become the standard of quality, and that, in the not too distant future, publishers will require their human translators to translate like machines . . There there will be no Terminator to save us.
[Note: the first of the translations of Shakespeare’s sonnet at the beginning of this report belongs to William Ospina; the second is from ChatGPT and the third from Ramón García González].
Hojman, E. (2023, May 18). The translation, in check by artificial intelligence. theSpanish newspaper https://www.epe.en/en/april/20230518/artificial-intelligence-translation-books-literature-87433923
