PRONOUN MIXUPS: ANOTHER AI TRANSLATION SPECIALTY

 

By Carlos de Paula

 

It does not take much to realize that not all languages are similar. Sounds, alphabets, intonations are just some of the obvious differences between Russian and Chinese, for instance. But there is much more than that, much feared grammar. Some languages have articles, others don’t, some have declensions, many do not, several have tons of verb tenses, others have simple verb structures, so on, so forth. One area where AI translation often messes up is personal pronouns.

 

Take for instance Portuguese and Spanish, two languages where AI wreaks real havoc in the pronoun area.   

 

I have handled many AI edits to and from these languages, and AI makes a real mess of things, which can be troublesome in litigation documents, for instance. AI does have a problem reading context and seems to regard the use of gender in Romance languages a futile nuisance. This can even cause legal issues, when pronouns are wrongly translated and seem to identify the incorrect party. The longer the text, the worst the problem.

 

That is why a professional, experienced and thorough editor should be retained to edit any text translated by AI.

 

Carlos de Paula is one of the top Brazilian Portuguese translators in the USA since 1982. And now a top Portuguese and Spanish AI Translation editor as well. 

For information on translations of Prenuptial agreements visit http://prenuptranslations.com

 

TRANSLITERATION AND TRANSLATION ARE NOT THE SAME THING

By Carlos de Paula

 

Most translation done in the United States involves European languages whose alphabets closely resembles ours, the Latin alphabet, with a few differences here and there, mostly letters with accents.  However, everybody knows that many languages globally are written in different alphabets. Some, like Greek and Russian, share a few characters and look a bit like ours, while others, like Chinese and Hindi, are written in script that does not at all resemble our English alphabet.

 

Translating most texts between languages with different alphabets is a linguistic issue, however, translating names of persons, locations and places can be a peculiar challenge.

 

That is because a lot of transliteration has changed in the last few decades. Case in point, Mao Tse Tung became Mao Zedong, Bombay became Mumbai, Alma Ata, Almaty, etc. There has been little change in Japanese transliteration: Nakamura is still Nakamura, Nagoya, Nagoya, so on, so forth. That is because Japanese is a syllabic language.

 

Transliterating a simple person’s name in alphabets that resemble ours can be a nightmare. For instance, when I was writing a book on car racing in the 70s, the last name of a Greek driver appeared spelled in four different ways in non-Greek literature, so it was up to me to choose a transliteration.

 

In immigration cases this can have devastating outcomes. Whenever I receive a document written in a different alphabet I ask the client to provide the spelling appearing in US visas, passports and the like. Believe it or not, a simple “iy”, “ye” or “ii” ending can cause all types of trouble for a client.

For more information http://birthcertificatetranslated.com

JUST HOW GOOD IS AI TRANSLATION?

By Carlos de Paula

 

I have been exposed to machine translation from the very beginning, so in the 90s I had already tried computer software in a few language pairs. To tell you the truth, they were all very bad back then.

 

However, time flies when you are having fun, and it does the same when you are not. With time translation software has become better, I must admit. However, most AI translations still sound like AI text, devoid of style and life, incapable of understanding figures of speech, cynicism, irony, humor, nuances, and the proverbial text between the lines.

 

However, I knew that sooner or later it would be widely adopted as a tool, so in the last couple of decades I continued to study several software titles in myriad languages.

 

As it stands, AI produced translation still has a major problem: it reads context very poorly. That, in certain languages, can have disastrous consequences, for the same word can have different meanings in the same language, for instance, “recurso” can have several meanings in Portuguese. This can cause all types of nasty havoc. Embarrassment is one such problem. Legal issues are more serious, for, to this day, the most popular AI translation tools around make positive negative, and negative positive, with disturbing frequency. This in a contract can lead to litigation, great expense and loss of face.

 

Not only that, AI frequently picks up the wrong translation for a given term, often leading to hilarious renderings. Again, translation software fails to connect the dots where the dots are often very important.

 

Another problem is that AI translation works reasonably when text is well written. As writing skills are in short order these days, AI is often used to make sense of the senseless, haphazardly put together, ghastly collections of words. A badly written text will sound wacky, bizarre, after being put through translation software.

 

In short, commercial planes are flown by automatic pilot for the longest part of a trip, but qualified pilots have to take-off and land the darn things. It is no different with translations.

 

Let us face it, one cannot stop the wheels of commerce. Businesses penny-pinch as much as possible when it comes to translation work, it has always been so, for it is often seen as nuisance.  Now that it is available a few clicks away, for free, the perception is that we translators have been highway robbers all along.

 

I saw the writing on the wall and specialized in editing AI produced translations, for it is the future of the written translation industry, whether we like it or not. I have been able to turn atrocities and inaccuracies into good and precise text,  even making them enjoyable. When a client comes to me with “a translation he did”, I already know what that means. I only draw the line on certified document translations: I do not accept AI done translations prepared by clients, after all, I have to certify that I did it. Those are done from scratch.

 

Whether AI will ever reach perfection is debatable. Brazilians, for one, like to be witty, and AI fails to handle wittiness all that well, so that a culturally competent editor will always be necessary. In other words, rather than making it my number one enemy, I decided to coexist with it. We translators have no choice. I am not that handsome to become an influencer.

 

Carlos de Paula is one of the top Brazilian Portuguese translators in the USA since 1982. And now a top Portuguese AI Translation editor as well.