In the inaugural episode of the In Other Words Podcast, we unpack the perils and possibilities of translation technologies with Dr. Anthony Pym, Professor of Translation Studies, Languages and Linguistics at The University of Melbourne.
Dr. Pym has written extensively on translation theory and applied translation practices. Recently, he co-authored a book on how to integrate translation technologies into translator training and language learning.
Transcript
Host: Will machine translation (MT) replace human translators in the future?
Anthony: Oh the future is very long [laughter] Yes! Obviously Yes. Just on the trajectory of mapping the improvement, especially in very recent years. The question is when it’s not if.
(intro music) [The In Other Words Podcast theme fades in, a relaxed, lo-fi beat evoking curiosity, urban streetscapes and digital discovery.]
Host: Welcome to the In Other Words Podcast. A Place where we talk to translators and academics about key developments in the world of translation. For translators and all those who believe that translation still matters. I’m your host, Nicholas Jolly, a Masters student in translating and interpreting at The University of Melbourne.
Today, I’ll be talking to Anthony Pym, one of the world’s leading translation scholars on how online machine translation and generative AI is changing the landscape for translators.
Host: Could you just describe what exactly machine translation is?
Anthony: Oh come on, how long have you got?
Host: as concisely as you can.
Anthony: Yeah, it has had a really long history, going from models of code breaking to models of writing grammatical rules between particular languages. In the late nineties it moved into statistical methods, leaving linguistics behind, just calculating the probabilities of association in a database. What we’ve got these days are statistical methods with probabilities, they can go through a big database very quickly, you’ve got an incoming text, it can match all possible translations of them in the database, and then filter out, bit by bit, those that are less likely to be there, looking at the words to the left and to the right of the set of words being considered. And then for the ones to the left and the right, looking at them in context and them in context.
Host: What do you think are the implications – you say its not happening in 20-30 years, its happening now – what are the implications of this increasing use of machine translation tools? You see it in social media apps like Facebook, Instagram now have their own translation function where you can translate comments. Wechat has the same thing. What do you see as the broader implications?
Anthony: For me it can go one or two ways. I don’t really care about the long term employment of translators. People will be translators. They will become revisers, cross-cultural consultants or they will sell things in different languages. You always find work. [But] I’m worried about multilingualism. It’s getting to the extent that people will say… look I can use the technology so I don’t have to learn Chinese, for example, or any other language. People might just stay there and be monolingual, and I think that would be very detrimental to multicultural societies like Melbourne, where people really have to know about the other cultures. Or it can open up people to content and other languages which will motivate them to find out more. Use their curiosity and start to use it as a tool to learn languages. And AI (artificial intelligence) and MT can help you learn languages a lot. Especially AI it can be a really great conversation partner in a foreign language etcetera. So I am intrigued that it can go those two ways. I suspect at the moment its going in the negative way, people are using it instead of learning languages. But I think if we can bring it into our language classes, when you learn a language you learn AI with it, and MT, that will make it able to motivate people to learn languages and help multilingualism.
Host: Great. That’s all the questions I have. Thank you so much, those were really helpful responses.
Anthony: Very Good.
Nicholas: [background music] Thank you for listening to the In Other Words podcast. If you liked the episode, please feel free to leave a review on our Apple Podcasts page, or subscribe to our Substack.
In Other Words is written and produced on the traditional lands of the Wurundjeri People of the Kulin Nation. We acknowledge that sovereignty was never ceded, and pay our respects to elders past, present and future.
Interview guest Dr. Anthony Pym — recorded with permission. Interview by Nicholas Jolly. Intro/outro music: Good Night - Lofi Cozy Chill Music by FASSounds. Used with Pixabay Content License. Podcast thumbnail by Nicholas Jolly. Created with Canva Free.
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