“My love grows stronger if its appearance is weak; / and I have not ceased to love you even if it shows little; / Mal is public love, whose perfection / the tongue of its owner proclaims everywhere.” says one.
“My love is weak even though it seems weak;/ I don’t like it less even if I show it less;/ That love is a trade that the rich,/ owner publishes it everywhere with his language.”, the second continues.
And third, “My love, though seemingly weak, is very strong, and I don’t love any less just because it looks that way.” the language of the author.
It seems easy to distinguish which of these versions is the work of a man and which is the work of a man. artificial intelligenceAfter all, relevant hardest poem to translate. At a time when newspaper articles reflecting both the magic and fear of artificial intelligence abound, translationsthat minefield editorial workseems perhaps the most suitable environment for its use, and by the way, reduce costs and escape from eternity translator complaints.
For Jorge CarrionCo-author with Taller Estampa and GPT electromagnetic fields. Artificial writing theories and applicationstranslation programs are “very useful tools for obtaining early versions of screenplays, technical or popular books, and essays without a literary ambition. human control. they still can’t translate high literaturebut it is likely that they will soon be able to do so.”
seems to agree pia gepetto (the name we gave ChatGPT for your participation in this report): “Machine translation programs have come a long way in recent years and in most cases can produce accurate and understandable literary translations. literary translation this is a highly specialized field and often these programs deeper sense of languageessential elements of literature, including nuances, puns, double meanings and metaphors.”
For ernest folchNavona and publisher of Folch & Folch states that “translating highly technical and highly mechanical texts with artificial intelligence programs is only vaguely possible, something like that prescription or traffic ticketI’m still skeptical though. Like any creative work, a translation needs all the virtues of emotion, sensitivity, and good judgment that a machine can never have.”
Ernest Folch, editor: “A translation, like any creative work, needs emotion, sensitivity, and good judgment, all the virtues a machine can never have.”
Cupcake PalmerThe XXIV Ángel Crespo Translation Award winner considers artificial intelligence translation “a useful tool for technical translations, but applying it to literature is a mistake. And they always have to go through revision, even if they are technical translations, and require highly experienced human eyes to detect and correct serious errors.” When it comes to literary texts, there are many factors that influence the decision of how to translate a sentence, a phrase, a metaphor, a pun, a recording of dialogues, a character’s way of speaking, cultural biases, etc.
reduce costs
Despite this, “some publishers are trying to make us translators proofreaders of translations made through AI. They pay us less. The application of AI to literary translation is aimed at reducing costs, not improving quality.” translation”.
Magdalena Palmer, translator: “Artificial intelligence is a useful tool for technical translations, but applying it to literature is a mistake”
for the translator Cristina Maciatranslating literature by machine is “not possible” and “all attempts have ended in disaster”, but if it were possible, Imagine a future where there are four invaluable translators responsible for deluxe editions “100% manual translation!” It is sold as a pure ecological product with slogans such as:
victims
In any case, while most of the reactions from other publishers consulted oscillate between suspicion and fear, industry gossip speaks of whispered talk of a publisher translating less demanding books into English. software then fixes them and puts them on the market. If true, it would be a bit like a saying about witches: There are no books translated by AI, but there are, there are. And its first victims will be translators but also readers.
Industry gossip speaks softly of a publisher who translates less demanding books using software.
for the author patrick pron“not all publishers are sensitive to this fact: a good translator is a commercial claim In addition to the quality guarantee for your books; these publishers pay their translators little or no money, and the fact that they will be paid almost no salary from now on is great news for them, but not for those who will have to compete with these publishers. digital slaves in semi-slavery conditions, nor, of course, for readers who would pay for worthless books.”
distinction
For Carrión, the moment when it will be impossible to distinguish whether translation is done by neurons or by bits will undoubtedly come “if it hasn’t come yet and we haven’t noticed it either.” “It is possible for machine translation technology to reach the current level in the future,” says Kibar Pia Gepeto. Difficult to distinguish between an artificial intelligence translation and a human translation. 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 required to fully understand the work. it will be very important who translated or who wrote a book; Therefore, there will be no need to read.”
Perhaps the great danger lurking in automatic translations is that at some point they will become the standard of quality.
In a recent New York Times article entitled “ChatGPT’s False Promise,” Noam Chomsky claims that big mistake of artificial intelligence This is because the human mind is a “surprisingly efficient and elegant system”, not “a heavy statistical model matching engine that swallows hundreds of terabytes of data and predicts the most logical answer in a conversation or the most likely answer to a scientific question”. working with a small amount of information and trying to produce explanations, not extracting rough correlations between data” (my own translation).
neoliberal strategy
Publisher Ernest Folch will likely agree. According to him, we are faced with a technology fanaticism and a neoliberal strategy to cut costs. “They want us to believe this stupidity that machines can change or even improve our brains.. And the truth is, like any creative work, a translation needs things like emotion, sensitivity and common sense, all the virtues a machine can never have. Literature is nothing but a machine, and I honestly don’t believe there are literary translations, let alone neat and clever literary works that can be produced by AI. The only major finding of AI so far is the name that gives it a glimpse of what it isn’t. It may be useful for many things, but certainly not for anything related to creation.”
In any case, perhaps the great danger lurking in automatic translations is that at some point they will become the standard of quality, and in the not-too-distant future, publishers ask human translators to translate like machines. There will be no Terminator to save us.
[Nota: la primera de las traducciones del soneto de Shakespeare del principio de este reportaje pertenece a William Ospina; la segunda es de ChatGPT y la tercera de Ramón García González].